Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

buy.louisck.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 291 posts

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

#251

Post by ryanwaggoner »

sunchild wrote: post #210
sc00ter wrote: post #197

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, breakin…

I was more concerned that he paid $35K for a paypal-powered commerce site that sends plaintext passwords by email.

Yeah, because if someone got ahold of that password...they could login and download that $5 video!

In this case, I think this is actually superior, because a lot of the purchasers are going to buy and download this, and never login again. Why have them type in the same password they use for their email and banking, and have to worry about keeping it safe indefinitely?

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

#252

Post by bgentry »

sunchild wrote: post #210
sc00ter wrote: post #197

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, breakin…

I was more concerned that he paid $35K for a paypal-powered commerce site that sends plaintext passwords by email.

4 reasons the plaintext password is OK in this situation:

1) They generate the password for you, how else are they supposed to get it to you?

2) Just because they email it to you in plaintext does not mean they are storing it in plaintext (they could easily send the email at the time the password is generated)

3) You won't reuse this password on other sites because you didn't choose it. The primary reason why it's bad to store passwords without proper hashing is that a leaked password database means hackers can tap into everybody's email/bank accounts which are using the same password.

4) All the password gets you is access to download a video (no other personal info available). Not a huge risk.

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

#253

Post by aidenn0 »

krelian wrote: post #57
citricsquid wrote: post #13

I really hope people don't turn this into a "Louis CK did it, so you should publish without DRM!". I agree with the anti-drm sentiment a lot of people hold, but this experiment only worked because it's "rare". Every time something like this is done people use it as evidence of the viability of the idea (Radiohead's pay what you want comes to mind too) and that really shouldn't be done. The only reason I heard about t…

I think the Humble Bundle is a good measure to how these kind of experiments will succeed of fail. People are now starting to "complain" that they are released too often, and I certainly am seeing less and less enthusiasm for each subsequent bungle but there are still making a shitload of money on them, otherwise they would simply stop doing this. Personally, I think that in a (utopian) world where media is easily av…

Well there's also the issue of how many games can I play? I've stopped buying from the humble bundles since the combination of that, plus good old games, I have enough games for now. If I had half a dozen unwatched comedy specials on my hard drive, I wouldn't have bought Louis' video.

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

#254

Post by nathanlrivera »

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…

Just look at Markus Persson. He was a relatively unknown indie game developer until Minecraft.

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

#255

Post by evilduck »

patio11 wrote: post #53
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…

More valuable than the long tail is that he probably has an email list of ~20,000 people -- and more by the hour -- who have demonstrated interest in paying money for Louis C.K. comedy specials. I trust I don't need to tell you what to do with that if you're the exclusive producer of Louis C.K. comedy specials.

Louis C.K. has 800k followers on Twitter too, and he was talking about it there too (that's where I discovered what he was doing).

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

#256

Post by dodedo »

interlagos wrote: post #241
dodedo wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting theory but I'm not convinced it has a factual basis. Maybe readers decided that King's book just sucked and were waiting for it to improve? Neither you nor I can draw a meaningful conclusion on that point. What can be demonstrated, empirically, is that money can be made without imposing draconian controls.

Empirically what has been shown is that if you do an IAMA on Reddit leading up to the release of your "experiment", a lot of people will play along. It does not carry over to any other release, and says absolutely nothing about DRM or atypical release plans. Lots of people sell videos online without the middle man. Most see no sales.

"It does not carry over to any other release, and says absolutely nothing about DRM or atypical release plans"

This is demonstrably false. In fact, every artist who's ever done an online release of their content without DRM has seen sales in proportion to their general popularity. We've seen this with Radiohead, with NIN, and with many other lesser artists.

In every case, the profits were roughly in line with the general popularity of the artist's content.

"Lots of people sell videos online without the middle man. Most see no sales."

And most content distributed through the various middle-man networks likewise is a failure. Most OSS software is a flop. Most commercial software is also a flop. This statement is neither surprising nor relevant.

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

#257

Post by _delirium »

dmbass wrote: post #218
jonnathanson wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm anything but an apologist for the current model. But if it disappears, we haven't necessarily made life any better for lesser-known artists. So if we are to remove one of the critical steps to success (i.e., the marketing and promotional spend of traditional labels, publishers, networks, and studios), we should hope that there's a viable replacement. Or we should try to build one. In our haste to cast out the old…

There are lots of examples of artists blowing up without labels (though some subsequently start their own or get signed) in the past few years by distributing their music on the internet for free. See: Pretty Lights, Girl Talk, Odd Future, The Weeknd, Justin Bieber, etc. It won't be viable for every artist/band but neither is the music industry of old. You must bring something special because otherwise nobody will ca…

It's not clear the internet has actually improved the odds, though. There are plenty of examples of artists DIYing their way to at least moderate prominence decades ago as well; particularly common in punk-rock, where you've got Bad Religion, Fugazi, Crass, etc. You didn't have blogs to promote your music, but did have zines, flyers at shows, college radio, etc.

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

#258

Post by dspillett »

nettdata wrote: post #81
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…

Back in the early days of the internet, I was the IT Manager at Nettwerk Records. We went out of our way to put complete, high quality MP3's of every song we owned the rights to online, for free, because we were willing to let the music stand on its own. We believed that it was worth giving potential new fans the chance to hear what they were (hopefully) buying, and that really was the case. We had so much obscure mu…

But back in the early days of the Internet, the hassle/quality/price ratios were not the same, so I suspect that would not work as well these days.

For a start downloading a full CD would be quite a faf back when most people had dial-up or something else slow as their main connection method. Costly too if you were in a country/area where there were no plans that didn't result in you paying per minute for time on dial-up.

To keep the download size manageable you'd have to use a relatively low bitrate, which would probably mean most people could tell the difference between them and the CD, especially with the older compressors with psycoacoustic models inferior to those used today (giving the choice on dial-up: high quality some time later today, or low quality sooner).

Being able to download a track, at a high enough quality that you can't tell the difference without breaking out a spectrum analyser, in a matter of seconds means the number of people paying for the CD because that is easier is going to fall drastically. The number of people buying other merchandise of tickets for live gigs might remain more constant though: physical delivery and "being there" can't be refactored by a fast connection in the same way.

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

#259

Post by sunchild »

bgentry wrote: post #252
sunchild wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was more concerned that he paid $35K for a paypal-powered commerce site that sends plaintext passwords by email.

4 reasons the plaintext password is OK in this situation: 1) They generate the password for you, how else are they supposed to get it to you? 2) Just because they email it to you in plaintext does not mean they are storing it in plaintext (they could easily send the email at the time the password is generated) 3) You won't reuse this password on other sites because you didn't choose it. The primary reason why it's ba…

The correct way to handle this is to email an authenticated link that prompts password setting on the store.

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

#260

Post by electromagnetic »

nathanlrivera wrote: post #254
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…

Just look at Markus Persson. He was a relatively unknown indie game developer until Minecraft.

This is exactly what I was thinking. No one knew who he was, and I'm still seeing Minecraft as one of the most popular apps on the iPhone.

It's currently the 25th highest grossing app, 12th if you exclude all the free games that rely on in game purchases.

The fact that my wife knows what Minecraft is speaks worlds, when I barely get her to pick up an xbox remote, let alone think she'd find an obscure indie developer.

Post reply on HN