Louis C.K. experiment results: over $500,000 in 4 days • Hacker News Board

Re: Louis C.K. experiment results: over $500,000 in 4 days

#191

Post by bobbles » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 1:54 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #43

callmeed wrote: post #34

$32K for a site that does checkout with PayPal!? That sounds nuts to me, even with over-planning for high traffic. FYI I recently posted a RoR app that lets you sell a file with Stripe: https://github.com/2tablespoons/Thylacine

You're thinking from the perspective of "geek who could actually implement this." Try thinking from the perspective of "entertainment personality who doesn't want their personal brand tarnished when their website blows up in their face and is willing to pay for surety of that. "

The comments are full of people proclaiming that the cost was too high, but then every time someone asks for an estimate on working as a freelance everyone says to charge as much as possible.

Re: Louis C.K. experiment results: over $500,000 in 4 days

#192

Post by mrleinad » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 1:57 PM UTC

Devil's advocate (another in a long list of threads here): I really like this model, and that the people actually creating contents receive good benefits cutting out the middle man..

however

There's this (I think correct) assumption that big labels are getting richer and richer by sucking a good portion of the money off the content creators, and providing almost no value in return. But they also create lots of jobs for other people, which in this model is reduced to a minimum. Could there be some way to fix the current model without losing all of those jobs for lots of people?

Re: Louis C.K. experiment results: over $500,000 in 4 days

#193

Post by aredington » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 1:57 PM UTC

Girl Talk's been using an even more beneficent form of this model since day one, which means far before getting popular. Gregg Gillis has achieved enough success to be touring and making money. There's still a couple caveats though:

1) Girl Talk is remixing bits of other songs that people already know, thus there's familiarity. 2) Trying to go through any label and traditional distribution model very likely would not have succeeded anyway, so trying something different wasn't really a choice.

Re: Louis C.K. experiment results: over $500,000 in 4 days

#194

Post by synnik » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 2:05 PM UTC

I also wonder what may have been different if this was not placed in the context of a very public experiment. How many of the purchases were political statements?

I think the same model needs to be employed, without any commentary, to get a true measure of the mechanism.

Re: Louis C.K. experiment results: over $500,000 in 4 days

#195

Post by onemoreact » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 2:08 PM UTC

jonnathanson wrote: post #186

ChuckMcM wrote: post #37

I'm glad he made some money on it. His mind will be blown when the 'long tail' kicks in (people buying this video 3 years from now, still). He mentions "This [$200,000] is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video." Here is the part where this can go off the rails. So the long tail will hit, peopl…

I'm all for this model. But a major challenge remains, and it's this: Trent Reznor, Radiohead, and even Louis C.K. were all hugely popular and successful before they employed this model. Can the model work for lesser-known artists attempting to capture an audience? In theory, sure. If anything, I could see this model's working out quite well for the proverbial little guy. But first, that little guy faces a big challe…

The current model does not work for less popular artists, so I have trouble seeing the downside.

Re: Louis C.K. experiment results: over $500,000 in 4 days

#196

Post by eli » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 2:09 PM UTC

absentbird wrote: post #189

jonnathanson wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for this model. But a major challenge remains, and it's this: Trent Reznor, Radiohead, and even Louis C.K. were all hugely popular and successful before they employed this model. Can the model work for lesser-known artists attempting to capture an audience? In theory, sure. If anything, I could see this model's working out quite well for the proverbial little guy. But first, that little guy faces a big challe…

Well there are also people like Jonathan Coulton (the guy who sings "code monkey") who started with nothing and built a fan base. Also he did the ending song for both Portal games.

No doubt there are examples of people who built a fanbase online from nothing.

But I'm sure it helps a lot if you happen to write songs that appeal to nerds and then get featured on slashdot as a sort of novelty act. I don't see that working as well if you write earnest alt-folk love songs instead of songs about Mountain Dew.

Incidentally, there was a story about Coulton on NPR not long ago [1].

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/05/14/136279162/an-inter...

Re: Louis C.K. experiment results: over $500,000 in 4 days

#197

Post by sc00ter » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 2:14 PM UTC

I'm glad it's worked out for him, and unless I'm misunderstanding, it seems he's double-counting his production costs in working out his (pre-tax) profit, so he may have done even better than that:

"the production of the video cost around $170,000. (This was largely paid for by the tickets bought by the audiences at both shows)"

"12 hours [after launching] we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website."

Surely one or the the other covered the cost of production, not both?

"As of Today, we've sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000"

(170K + 550K) - 250K - paypal fees != 200K

Which makes me wonder if this statement is correct:

"This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you"

On the other hand, whilst in the other front-page article on HN he says "I've never seen a check from a [TV] comedy special", I only heard of Louis C.K. from watching one of his stand-up shows on TV on an airline, so even if he didn't get payed directly, there's still publicity value in them.

[Edited for clarity]

Re: Louis C.K. experiment results: over $500,000 in 4 days

#198

Post by Goronmon » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 2:17 PM UTC

eli wrote: post #196

absentbird wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there are also people like Jonathan Coulton (the guy who sings "code monkey") who started with nothing and built a fan base. Also he did the ending song for both Portal games.

No doubt there are examples of people who built a fanbase online from nothing. But I'm sure it helps a lot if you happen to write songs that appeal to nerds and then get featured on slashdot as a sort of novelty act. I don't see that working as well if you write earnest alt-folk love songs instead of songs about Mountain Dew. Incidentally, there was a story about Coulton on NPR not long ago [1]. [1] http://www.npr.or…

But I'm sure it helps a lot if you happen to write songs that appeal to nerds and then get featured on slashdot as a sort of novelty act.

Isn't that kind of the whole point though? You can't just be a no-name, release some music that is very similar to a large number of artists in a popular genre of music, and then expect to hit it big.

Re: Louis C.K. experiment results: over $500,000 in 4 days

#199

Post by ehutch79 » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 2:18 PM UTC

skurry wrote: post #117

So this is why Big Media is freaking out. Anyone with a MacBook and a Shure SM58 mic can record a studio quality album, and anyone with a Canon 5D on a shoulder rig can produce professional quality video. The Internet replaces the studios' giant duplication and distribution networks. And now Louis proves that this applies to full features as well, and that the artist can make really good money with this model. Remind…

That's not really true, there's a lot that goes into 'professional' recordings, video or audio.

Mostly, experience is a huge part of it.

There's also a world of difference from a shure 58 on a macbook line-in, and high quality mics on a protools rig.

that said, my band recorded a 4 song ep for about 600$ at a local studio start to finish recently. (i linked to the album on my about page) I don't think any of us expect to make our money back on this one, unless everyone on here decided to go buy a copy on itunes, so we're giving it away.

Were we to do it all ourselves, the investment in equipment would have been at larger than that, and then amortized of a small amount of sales. The resulting quality also would not have even been close.

It's also hard to do promotion on a national scale without some kind of built in audience. Hows a small local band or whatnot going to reach people on the other side of the country, or in other countries entirely?

Re: Louis C.K. experiment results: over $500,000 in 4 days

#200

Post by jfruh » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 2:22 PM UTC

onemoreact wrote: post #195

jonnathanson wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for this model. But a major challenge remains, and it's this: Trent Reznor, Radiohead, and even Louis C.K. were all hugely popular and successful before they employed this model. Can the model work for lesser-known artists attempting to capture an audience? In theory, sure. If anything, I could see this model's working out quite well for the proverbial little guy. But first, that little guy faces a big challe…

The current model does not work for less popular artists, so I have trouble seeing the downside.

The current model doesn't work for most less popular artists. All the artists who came up through the system and are now superstars were less popular once, and the promotional machinery had a big part in making them popular (and rich).

This is sort of how I feel about the traditional publishing industry. The way it's worked traditionally is that can't quite tell which authors are going to be big sellers, so you take a chance on a bunch, and the more successful ones subsidize the less successful. Now the successful ones for obvious reasons resent this and can shift to a self-publishing model. The problem is they never would have gotten successful had some publisher taken that initial chance on them. Where's the next generation coming from?