Conte and Neistat are doing something and I can't decide if it's important
I don't know what's going on exactly, but I've been following a YouTube conversation between two very interesting people (one is Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon, the other Casey Neistat, a popular maker and YouTube Big Deal™ w/ 9M subscribers) and I feel like it's at the very least interesting, and maybe potentially important.
First, understand I rarely watch anything on YouTube and it's extremely hard to convince me to care about what happens in that world. So the story starts here, with Casey founding a new company in NYC called "368" which is going to be some sort of creator studio. Rented some giant building with half a plan. It's a pretty fun video if slightly obnoxious in the YouTube rapid-cut-I'm-cool way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA_zTtF5WDc
So he makes this video, and Jack Conte (who you may also recognize as 1/2 of Pomplamoose) makes this (incredible) pitch video for 15 minutes of his time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYBOPPoiRRY
So Casey accepts, and Jack shows up in NYC and they talk about some sort of partnership between their companies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj6-U7GVDt8
They omit the details of what was discussed of course, but something about the whole thing is really tickling me.
Patreon has become an incredibly important tool for artists of all kinds, and I see a lot of overlap between what they're doing and the indie forum space. They've been tremendously successful in a very short period of time. I'm pretty convinced in a few years it'll be clear what happened at that meeting and it won't have been nothing.