Why I Left FBE

I left FBE in 2018, and it’ll come to no one’s surprise when I say this company is an extremely toxic place, not only with how they treat their employees, but how they treat the work of other creators and artists.

People always come and go when it comes to any job, but since 2018 a large amount of employees have quit, most alarming is the amount that have quit without a job lined up, mainly because they couldn’t take being at FBE anymore and needed to get out for the sake of their mental health, and would rather risk going broke than staying there.

The founders of the company, the Fines, consume themselves with work, and are out of touch with the real world, so they take it as a negative when employees don’t let work consume their lives or try to have boundaries between work and their personal lives. A lot of people that would stand up for themselves and others have now left, and FBE continues their practice of hiring young naive employees who truly don’t know any better and are more easily taken advantage of. And it’s strange to see that the founders are still so involved in the day-to-day from nitpicking cuts to approving pitches, it becomes more confusing as they continue to hire people who are supposed to relieve them of these duties, but can’t help but insert themselves, making the process longer and more stressful than it has to be.

They also have “yes men” as higher ups, and I know they now gloat that it’s so “easy” to get what they want done since they no longer have people pushing back telling them “no.” Though the people telling them “no” were employees who wanted to make sure people had time for all their work, and could do simple things like take their promised hour lunch or feel like they could take a proper sick day or a day off in general. I know that the production department is in shambles now that there are no “no’s.” Many of the producers have quit, and the ones still there are stretched thin to the point of some of them breaking down in the office.

Being overworked is one of the many things wrong with the work environment, others include:

Sexism

The women at FBE are not taken seriously, though I know this isn’t a problem unique to FBE, but still worth pointing out. There have been many instances where less qualified men have been hired or promoted, while women attempting to advance are repeatedly turned down. Honestly, most people are only promoted when someone unexpectedly quits…so there have been many promotions this last year.

Before there was an HR department, if there was sexual harassment at FBE, especially with older male talent towards female employees, upper management would just advise that they go along with it and take it as a “joke.” After FBE got an HR department, women who would report the older male talent or even male coworkers would soon be found to be “problematic” or having “attitude problems” by their managers for being outspoken about being mistreated. There was also one manager who screamed at a female employee when they were alone for correcting him during a meeting. He eventually took her to HR for being “cold” towards him after the incident and for making him feel “stupid.” So the higher ups would just leave it at “these women have attitude problems.”

The company also hated doing anything “too girly.” There was a female producer who wanted to make content focusing on the female talent and center it on issues impacting women only to be met with criticism from the Fines that it would alienate the male audience, though the inverse is never questioned. They can only think within narrow gender stereotypes.

Racism

I’ll be blunt and say there are many incompetent white men at FBE. They tend to stay the longest because are allowed to get away with the most. The most frustrating figure still there being Jon Green, who has run every department he has been in to the ground, but we all assume he hasn’t been fired due to being a close friend of the Fines.

Some of the most outspoken people were people of color, and if you look at a recent staff picture of FBE they have replaced those “troublesome” staff with mostly white employees. It’s not diverse and their content suffers for it, not that it’s groundbreaking content either way.

There were many instances of non-white employees being disciplined more harshly than white counterparts. A female black receptionist was fired fairly quickly due to not being the best receptionist, however, a white PA who had crashed a company rented van, deleted footage not once but twice within his first month of employment, and was drinking underage on company premises was allowed to stay on for a long while after that with little repercussions. The manager who hired that PA would say that he has that “clean cut” look that the Fines like.

A Hispanic female producer who had been there for years was fired, because to no one’s surprise, another Jon Green led department was crumbling, so he and another manager essentially fabricated that she wasn’t completing a certain task, and that she was the cause of the department failing. This firing angered other employees since it was obvious that management were the ones failing and were using her as a scapegoat. This sparked an exodus from FBE employees who began to quit without securing another job first.

Being Underpaid

The pizza/puppy parties and drink carts became annoying after a while when you were only getting paid minimum wage yet you saw they had money to throw an extravagant holiday party with an open bar and take 80+ people to Disneyland.

In addition to underpaying, FBE would also ask employees to volunteer their time, unpaid, to plan and execute events like their FBE Live Meet & Greet with fans, and there was no event in 2018 because they couldn’t convince anyone to complete such a ridiculous ask.

However, one of the biggest slaps to the face of employees was that after the React World scandal they doubled the amount the talent/ ”Reactors” are paid on an upward sliding scale basis. Accounting was baffled by this and advised to not have an upward sliding scale to deaf ears. The Fines were scared the Reactors would refuse to continue the show, while the employees working there, who naively stood behind them during the scandal, were constantly refused a livable wage. Talent potentially leaving was never an actual problem, no Reactor ever made any comment or move to leave the show after the scandal, it’s just something the Fines became paranoid about.

React World

Why would the Fines be paranoid about the Reactors being unhappy and possibly speaking out against them? Well, the React World scandal was a blessing for FBE talent since before the scandal they had very restrictive contracts that essentially banned them from being creators and once the scandal hit, FBE gave the talent more money and finally changed their contracts and let them have their own YouTube channels and gave them the freedom to be creators, though with still many restrictions in place. There’s only a small number of talent who they actually try to get brand deals for and use consistently in their content, whose exclusivity contracts probably make the most sense, so it’s concerning that they have hundreds of normal people who don’t film that often in some very intense contracts.

The Fines are terrified of any talent potentially becoming huge, so if they see that certain talent have discovered a format or a working relationship together that is getting them views that’s not within FBE, that is when they come back with a revised contract limiting/restricting this success.

React World itself was an insane thing to personally experience. I thought the company was going to implode, and now I wish they had. I was naive at the time of this scandal and essentially believed everything they told us even though there were things I knew they were lying about, but I hoped that maybe I just didn’t understand it correctly. So there was all this mess about trademarks and licensing, and how they wanted to make sure their assets were protected, however, their claims of not wanting to go after people who did similar reaction content were untrue. Before React World, some employees’ daily tasks were to scour YouTube and flag any videos to the Fines if any creator was doing reaction content that resembled whatever they felt was too similar to FBE and then they would try to take them down.

There are also those times from FBE’s own social media where they tried going after Ellen DeGeneres for doing a segment on kids reacting to old toys, or they would constantly make snide remarks about Buzzfeed, even though they badly want to be like Buzzfeed now. They would also fire talent if they appeared on Buzzfeed or content similar to it.

If React World had gone through without a scandal, I believe they would continue trying to take down similar creators.

Now to the biggest thing, a lot of former employees have now worked at more reputable companies and have learned the importance of paying for and licensing images, videos, music, etc., and it is horrible to realize how hypocritical FBE is. They do not have an acquisitions department or at least a person dedicated to making sure they are correctly and legally using images, videos and music. They do not respect or care about other creators or artists. They cut or photoshop out any trademarks on images, they do not pay for any images used in their content, same goes with videos and music. They don’t even have the courtesy to reach out and ask for permission to use someone’s work, knowing that the followup would be the question of compensation since they do not want to pay. With videos and music, they like to layer the sound and edit in a certain way so they will not be picked up for a potential strike. They will always claim fair use but their videos are monetized and they are making money off of copyrighted content, but I’m no lawyer so I’ll leave it at that. It just doesn’t sit well with many that FBE never compensates for the use of other people’s work, and yet they are known to go after other creators, especially ones with a smaller pull who they can easily stomp out.

This has been written to give people a snapshot of what some of us have experienced, I’m sure there are many other frustrating stories I have yet to hear about and there are many more negative things I could list out but it’s already such a long post, and perhaps others had happier experiences and loved their time there. I won’t deny I had some positive experiences at FBE. Many of us formed lasting friendships that have continued long after leaving the company, and that is the one thing many of us who have left can agree to about the positives of FBE, but aside from that and gaining some followers through being in the videos, there’s not much more I can say about the positives when so many people’s mental health have been affected.

I hope someone reads this that is able to make some good change at FBE. It’s time they learn how to respect those that work for them, and respect those whose work they use for their content. They need to take care of the basics first.