Steven Crowder is a right-wing YouTuber whose fame has rapidly grown over the past 5-6 years.
I used to be a big fan of his. However, his show started going downhill in late 2018, and he also got on the "stolen election" train after November 2020, which was just cringe and very difficult to watch. I mostly moved my YouTube right wing political watching over to the much more measured Ben Shapiro, but I still occasionally watch Crowder. I still have a soft spot for Crowder, because it was during his show when my brain "broke through" during my intense depression/anxiety in 2018. After about 7 weeks of not being able to feel any positive emotion, I laughed at Crowder's show one night in October 2018, and that was the beginning of what would be a rapid improvement after that. Crowder's show didn't cure me, but it was during his show when things first showed signs of going back to normal, so I'll forever remember that moment.
Crowder's show was originally independent. The weekly show went daily in an attempt to grow, and Crowder monetized this move by creating "Mug Club", a subscription format where much of the show content required a paid membership, and free members only got short highlight clips. This was somewhat successful, and Crowder's popularity was still growing. However, the show still needed a bigger budget for what Crowder wanted to do.
In 2017, the independent Crowder joined CRTV, in order to get access to a bigger budget and presumably higher pay for himself. Mug Club continued to exist, and postured as is if it was the same as before, but a major change occurred. A signup for Mug Club was actually a subscription to CRTV, and the only difference from a regular CRTV subscription was that you'd get a Crowder mug. Keep that in mind for later in this post.
CRTV was owned by poker-playing billionaire Cary Katz (who also owns PokerGo), but Katz eventually got out of that business, mostly due to headaches related to a legal dispute with one of CRTV's former hosts. In late 2018, CRTV merged with Glenn Beck's TheBlaze, which resulted in Crowder's show being on Beck's network.
Three key sidekicks on the Crowder show -- "Not Gay Jared", "Sven Computer", and "Aaron the Intern" left in 2018. This was related to the CRTV merge. From what I've heard, Crowder had promised the relatively low-paid original crew big raises if they ever grew and saw an increase in the show's budget, but then didn't give them much of a raise when the lucrative CRTV deal happened. This resulted in Sven openly protesting on a show (and immediately getting fired), and Jared quietly (but resentfully) quitting. Aaron, who is Jared's brother, quit along with him.
The show continued on TheBlaze for the past 4 years. Crowder's Mug Club was simply a gateway into a subscription for TheBlaze. Much like the CRTV situation, when you'd sign up for Mug Club, you were really signing up for Beck's network.
In 2019, some fans expressed concern regarding Crowder's partnership with TheBlaze. Some didn't like Beck, and didn't want to give him money. Crowder put out a misleading statement that he "is an independent businessman" and "doesn't work for Glenn Beck". While technically true, Crowder was not telling the whole story. Crowder was (and still is) an independent businessman, but his show had contractually joined TheBlaze network, and could not operate independently. Indeed, Mug Club was just an affiliate of TheBlaze. When you joined MugClub, most of the money went to TheBlaze, with some going to Crowder as a commission. In return, TheBlaze gave Crowder a fairly big budget for the show.
This all came to a head recently. For reasons unknown, Crowder was unhappy with TheBlaze and wanted to quit the network when their contract was up in December 2022. Beck told Crowder that he was welcome to go, but informed Crowder that the list of Mug Club e-malis were legally property of TheBlaze, and would not be provided to Crowder. This infuriated Crowder, who had pretended all this time that he actually controlled MugClub, and now he was going to have egg on his face in various ways. First, anyone who signed up to MugClub during the CRTV or TheBlaze days would no longer be accessible to Crowder. Basically Crowder would be losing the e-mail list of fans for the past 5 years. This includes more than just Mug Club subscribers -- basically it's anyone who ever gave their e-mail to join Crowder's mailing list over the past 5+ years. Second, many subscribed to Mug Club fairly recently, believing it would give them access to a year of Crowder content. Instead, all current Mug Club members will no longer have access to paid Crowder content, even if they signed up and paid recently! As you can imagine, this makes Crowder look really bad, and leaves his paid fans in the lurch.
For months, Crowder has been begging Beck to let him have access to the Mug Club e-mail list. He promised that he would put out a very nice statement about his time at TheBlaze, and would have nothing but good things to say about them. Beck wouldn't have it. Crowder was told that if he left, the e-mail list would stay with TheBlaze.
This has led to Crowder dropping this bizarre announcement on YouTube, announcing "Mug Club Forever", a NEW Mug Club which Crowder actually controls this time:
Crowder also made a cryptic reference to "making it right" for those who recently paid for Mug Club (on TheBlaze), and now won't be getting their Crowder content. Presumably he will give some kind of comp subscription for the lost time to those people, but only if they sign for for Mug Club Forever and give him a way to contact them. Anyone who doesn't sign up for "new" Mug Club will not hear from Crowder anymore, and I assume many will get screwed and not realize how to get whatever comp subscription Crowder gives back to them.
What a mess.
Some of this is Crowder's fault, though. He was never honest and transparent that Mug Club changed from an independent subscription program to support him, and had become simply an affiliate link for CRTV and TheBlaze. He wasn't up front with the fact that your subscription and information was handled, controlled, and owned by Glenn Beck. In fact, my e-mail was sold by CRTV or TheBlaze to the Trump campaign, and I know this because I used a unique e-mail just for my Mug Club signup.
Somewhere Jared and Sven are laughing their asses off.