He's losing subscribers, and that's a good thing ft. Jerome Aceti

**Jerome Aceti** (0:00)
I have 5 million subscribers, but the reality is subscriber count genuinely just means nothing on YouTube.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
Your 7 most popular videos range from 5 million to 8.9 million views. Also, it's quite clear that your videos don't hit the numbers they used to.

**Jerome Aceti** (0:12)
There was a time where I was posting 5 or 6 videos across all my channels a day.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:16)
You're not dedicating as much of your time to it, it's not as important to you anymore.

**Jerome Aceti** (0:19)
My channel going down is proof that the system works. It's never been more fair than it is right now. This is the perfect time to start YouTube if you're genuinely willing to create good content.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:31)
So to paint a quick picture of where you are now, like I said, you're a semi-retired YouTuber, you still make videos, but that's not really the point anymore. But you are a venture partner, you are a co-founder of two businesses, and you are a partner in two businesses. Am I missing anything there?

**Jerome Aceti** (0:48)
No, that's the larger ones. There are other offshoot things, like whether they be smaller investments or things of that nature. For instance, I wouldn't name it on there, but I still run a Minecraft server. But I feel like the Minecraft server was much more impactful early on in the career, let's say, than it is nowadays.
But yeah, that's kind of the just of the main things.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:08)
Which of these ventures? I mean, obviously, your time is split across all of these. Where is your focus mostly these days?

**Jerome Aceti** (1:16)
So for the most part, I would say Nextide, because I feel like I can actually impact what's going on over there a little bit more than, let's say, some of these other companies that I'm involved with. The reason I say that is because some of them have shifted so greatly that even though they started as being a creator adjacent business, they're no longer there. And I am I'm going to be real with you. I'm kind of out of my depth in some of them. I'll give you a for instance, like there's Snagy for instance, which is a software development firm. When I first started getting involved with them, it's because they did a gaming convention, which was odd for a tech company, but they did a gaming convention and they were doing gaming server hosting. So the gaming server hosting being something that I could relate to, understand, and actually I had used their product going back to 2011 or 12
One of the two. So I was very familiar with the business. But now they do traditional software development for aerospace companies. I'll be real with you. I have no idea how to do any of that. I'm not a software developer. So I hop on calls and I help guide some of the vision. But if I'm being realistic, I'm very limited in what I can do to help out with that business.
That being said, Nextide, on the other hand, is a creator-affronted business. It's all about creating an ecosystem that's easier for brands to interact with and for creators to interact with. And it's something that I feel a lot more in line with. So I devote most of my working time to that.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:42)
Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about Nextide for a little bit. So it's essentially an ad tech tool for live streamers, because I understand that the core feature matches ads to live streams with this live guard feature that listens to the stream actively. And then if the streamer says or shows something not brand safe, the ad is automatically polled. So the advertiser's product brand cannot be pictured, screenshotted, recorded, seen alongside any unsavory content. Does that cover the product?

**Jerome Aceti** (3:11)
You explained it better than I probably could. Yep, that's exactly right. We're very proud of it. It's something that I feel like it's going to solve a lot of issues for not just brands, but also creators as well.
And that's ultimately why I wanted to even get involved at the ground level, because there's there were a lot of problems in the industry. One of them is kind of and you and I had talked about this earlier, the adpocalypse. That's what people call it whenever one content creator or a series of content creators decide to go off the rails, they might say some things that are seen as not brand safe. And unfortunately, what ends up happening in the industry is advertisers just broadly pull at like ad space from content creators. So it's not just that one content creator that's being punished the entire spaces, because they basically pull their marketing budgets and they say we need to reevaluate our strategy here. We need to rethink if this is really where we want our brand being pictured. Ultimately, they all come back to it because they realize the amount of eyeballs that are on these platforms you can't find anywhere else.