The YouTuber Ethan Klein accuses his agency of having siphoned off income of the equivalent of almost €600,000 and actually wants to leave as soon as possible. But this is not that easy.
What kind of YouTuber is this? Ethan Klein runs the H3 podcast with his wife Hila, in which they interview well-known online personalities, among other things. The associated YouTube channel has 2.87 million subscribers.
In addition, he has his own channel with 359,000 subscribers and the defunct channel h3h3 Productions, which still has 6 million fans subscribed to. With so many viewers comes a lot of money. To process these payments, Klein signed with BBTV in 2017.
BBTV is a so-called multi-channel network. These MCN are designed to help creators create, market, and monetize their content. However, they have gotten a rather dubious reputation in recent years: For example, the German content creator Simon “Unge” Wiefels announced in 2014 that he would no longer upload videos to his channels due to problems with his Mediakraft network and instead relied on a new, independent one Channel.
Ethan Klein has now posted a series of videos in which he says he thinks the agency stole from him. In the video embedded here you can watch the YouTuber’s version in English:
Who owns the money?
What is the problem? According to Klein, there is disagreement over the interpretation of the contract. In particular, it is about the income from the YouTube membership program. This is a subscription model where fans pay monthly to see exclusive content from their favorite channels.
Channel membership on YouTube has only been available since mid-2018, when Ethan Klein had already signed his contract. The income from these memberships is therefore not clearly defined in the contract.
As the YouTuber now noticed, BBTV took 30% of channel membership revenue for years, totaling $620,000 or just under €570,000. Klein believes he is entitled to the money, but the network sees it differently and wants to keep the money.
Klein says: For the YouTuber, the channel memberships come under the Google subscriptions, which according to the contract also include the YouTube Premium payment service. He would be entitled to the full income from this.
This is how the network sees it: In his videos, Klein reproduces conversations with the agency. His contacts at BBTV referred him to the “Other Revenue” clause. So the agency classified channel memberships as another revenue stream and withheld 30% of that as per the contract.
A court will have to decide who is right. Klein announced that he would sue the agency.
Klein: “I would have to be an idiot”
What’s next? In a second video, Klein gives his fans an update on the situation. In it he shows the responses of other content creators who had similar deals with BBTV and are now in the same situation.
But Klein now sees a completely different problem: the network is said to have postponed the payment of some YouTubers to the next month. Although unaffected by this himself, Klein is concerned:
Why do you pay some people and not others? My concern is that they don’t have the money and are about to file for bankruptcy.
For the YouTuber, that was arguably the final signal to pull the emergency brake and exit the network as soon as possible: “I’d have to be an idiot to sit there and allow them to keep collecting my money after all.”
That’s why it’s expensive: Klein explains that he actually had a notice period of 30 days. If he does not comply with this, he must repay the bonus that he received for concluding the contract. That’s another $10,000, or around €9,000.
The YouTuber is ready to bite the bullet:
So I said to myself, you know what, I’m more than willing to owe them $10,000 to get out of this because every penny I’m making now goes to them for the next two months.
In order to remove the network from its channels, however, BBTV apparently still has to agree, which had not yet happened when the video was released on April 9th. So it remains to be seen whether Klein will get his money back or even have to pay more to get out of this.
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