When Creators Left Their Creations
Rebranding to a new name may be good or bad.
If someone offers you $900 million for your company, would you have done it? If you are in it for the money, maybe it doesn’t sound so bad. Or maybe you were bored of doing the same thing for more than 10 years and you wanted to change, maybe this offer sounds tempting. Either way, that choice is up to you.
There are pros and cons to this. It will always start with a rough beginning, every rebranding will go through those. But will it last? That’s the question. Here are some examples of it:
Smosh
The Youtube Channel/website, Smosh was sold to another entertainment company called Defy Media back in 2011. However, in 2017, the co-founder of Smosh, Anthony Padilla, decided to leave and made his own channel, shocking many fans around the world. A year later, the company that bought Smosh officially shut down. In the harsh way to say it, it’s like it was sold for nothing.
But what happened here?
When Anthony left, he stated it’s because he hasn’t been creative lately. The job just doesn’t look as exciting as it used to be, and he held on to the hope that Smosh should be like how they used to start it. But it seems that this didn’t happen.
Then a year after he left, Defy Media shuts down, leaving their employees ‘homeless’ without any words. Anthony was horrified hearing this, then he posted a video of his thoughts about it, and that was where he let out all his frustration about the company that ruined his creation. It turned out that he had a lot of things to say about Defy Media at that time, but couldn’t say a lot yet because his good friends are still working there, so he didn’t want to jeopardize their jobs.
But now that the company had shut down, Smosh with the value of $0, Anthony was able to say all his thoughts about Defy Media. But to sum it up, this was what he said:
They owned the company and I was just an employee. — Anthony Padilla.
Today, Smosh still survived and bought by Rhett & Link. They are still releasing videos, but there are still people demanding to have the original Smosh was. Despite that, Smosh is still able to maintain what they do, but they weren’t the most subscribed channel again.
Star Wars
Although it’s a massive success, creator George Lucas sold the franchise for more than $4 billion in 2012 to Disney. It was huge news back then, fans realize that their beloved franchise is not over, especially when they announced the sequel trilogy.
There are definitely some flaws in it, even George wasn’t happy at first. The fanbase was starting to get toxic when the Force Awakens was out, I remember joining an online community about Star Wars and the reaction was mostly bitter that I had to leave it.
But that didn’t stop Disney to keep creating more of the movies. Star Wars has been releasing a lot of its movies, spin-offs, TV shows, and many more. So far, the franchise has been able to survive well despite the criticisms. Overall, the franchise earned $10,323,355,075 from the worldwide box office alone, not including their merchandise, video games, comics, and other things aside from the movies.
There were movies where George is involved in the projects, though he didn’t have full control of it. But still, when he visits the set, it quite indicates that he is still interested in the projects to come.
The biggest instant-communication was bought by Facebook last 2019 for $22 billion. It was doing well until Facebook was caught in a lawsuit on data stealing and the co-founder told the public to delete Facebook.
From his statement alone, it’s enough to realize that Brian Acton wasn’t quite happy with what Facebook had done. Not much is said from him ever since, but it seems that Whatsapp is still one of the biggest communication platforms to use.
Currently, its parent company is still having backlash about privacy breaches. They have been receiving boycotts as more than 90 companies pulled out their ads from Facebook after a campaign “Stop Hate for Profit” movement was started after the death of George Floyd. The campaign accused Facebook of allowing racism, violence, and other hoaxes to surface the platform.
As a result, they all boycotted the company, making Facebook lose $7 billion in the process as they pulled out of many of the social media platforms.
Today, Brian Acton is focusing on another alternative communication platform called Signal. Its focus was to do what Whatsapp failed to do, secure data.
There are definitely high and low points on this. But really, it all depends on the creators and buyers themselves. Some sold it for money and don’t want anything to do with it anymore, and some believed that they may reach to a wider audience by doing so.
The start won’t be easy, but the question is will they be able to manage it well to survive. Rebranding is fine, as long as they can still maintain what they offer to public.