Like this email, I've noticed Louis' personality permeates the whole experience. An interesting little tidbit: the password emailed to me after purchasing to access my content didn't work. I clicked the button to reset my password. I received an email with the text:
Apparently you forgot your password? Ok, so here's your new one, stupid:
My generated password was prefixed with "idiot.THENEWPASSWORD". It's little touches like this that I find really nice.
Also, needless to say, I would buy one of his specials in a heartbeat should a similar offer come up in the future. I watched the special last night and it was outrageously funny.
I wonder if the first passwords are deliberately wrong so that peope will request a new one (if they revisit instead of downlaoding/streaming immediately and never going back as they have no need to) in order to be insulted. Its the sort of thing I'd do...
Whats most interesting is that this whole release is notable because hes treating his fans like humans.
Making content easily accessible, being very hesitant to be invasive with emailing, not pushy at all with marketing. Being honest about how much he made as well as the costs and process of creating it, etc.
This experiment is detached from all the bullshit about "social media marketing". It shows that effectively selling on the internet comes down to is a) be interesting b) have great content and c) be accessible in as many channels as possible as a human being not corporate PR speak.
Which is exactly the reason I bought it. Sure, I like his comedy, but I wasn't going to buy his live show. That is, until I read his appeal and found out how humble he really is. It's great to finally see humans treating each other like humans and still make money.
Yeah, I hope more artists follow this example, because it's very successful for the artists and far more satisfying for the audience. Another person like that is Howard Tayler (author of Schlock Mercenary, among other things) who is a very, very clever author/businessman who is very inventive in how he interacts with his audience. For example, Howard holds parties to get people to help him ship out his books. They manage to mix fun with work and come out ahead.
the video made it for me- humble how it started with just him walking in through the front doors, then walk on stage with no warm up act and no announcements.
Nothing was over produced, human from start to finish
Does anybody else get the feeling there might be some clever marketing agency behind all this?
Louis persona seems so well thought out and is applied in every aspect. I never met the guy but it is astonishing how well he is following his known character in every public appearance.
Maybe he is just a well organized micromanager of himself. But if you think about the slight change of tone from his "Louis C.K." show on to his "Louis" program that brought him all his success. I just can't believe that this is all him on his own.
I think that when you write for yourself for that many years, you generate a really strong character. If there is an agency involved, then they have really good writers that understand how to write for his voice, which is in itself a huge challenge.
Louis CK is also famous for his work ethic. This amount of copy may seem like a ton to someone that is used to working with clients that always deliver late (not saying you do, but that was my experience when I did web work). I don't think this amount of copy is that hard for a working comedian, especially one as hard working as Louis.
From the email: 'And i know that now you are thinking "aw shit. Why'd i let this guy into my life this way?". Well dont worry. Because i really swear it that i wont bug you.'
Yes! this was exactly my initial reaction when I first saw this in my inbox so soon. The whole experience has been so honest, genuine and fun.
The development of the website, which needed to be a very robust, reliable and carefully constructed website, was around $32,000.
What? Oh well, probably including traffic & hosting etc pp?
It's interesting how you can buy 2 new cars for the price of making that website. It's a freaking website people. With text and images. And you can download something. And there's a donate button. Not rocket science. Not a huge multi-man multi-month effort. Or if it is then it's being done wrong.
In other news... it's good to be in the business of making websites for celebrity techno-newbs. :)
On a related note, I once had a conversation with a potential client who told me they'd spent $3 million to make their website. I about lost it. Text and images people. Forms. Buttons. Stylesheets. Not "hard" in the same league as buying 30 Tesla Roadsters market value kind of hard.
And no I will not tell any of you who that client was! bats your fingers away
This website had to stand up to Reddit/HN/Slashdot/Digg/Fark all at the same time. Not only that, but it had to continue functioning, people still had to be able to download the video they just paid for. You and I would be able to put this together ourselves no problem, but I could see why Louis would want to pay money to just have it taken care of.
Also, that figure might include the cost for bandwidth that it has cost to serve up the 1.2 GB file.
Bandwidth for the videos was provided by Amazon S3 directly[1]. So if he brought in half a million dollars in 5 days from selling his video at $5, that's 100,000 purchases, and if everyone only downloaded the 720p video at 1.2GB that's 30TB per day, hosted only at Amazon's Northern California location, it would end up costing almost $10,000 in bandwidth (priced as an entire month). Shit aint cheap, but at $5 each, he makes a decent profit. That's just for the 4 days he provided numbers for.
[1] The link download link ends up resolving to http://download.aws.louisck.net/ (even if you stuck the video filename on the end of that, it's a signed URL, so you're SOL unless you go through his website after paying him money)
Oh yes, I am aware it was hosted directly by S3. So $12,000 for the website itself, then another $20,000 in infrastructure costs (S3 hosting, cloudfront or whatever else he used to host his actual assets, something to do dynamic pages and PayPal integration for instant receipt of downloads for buyers).
The $32,000 number quoted at that point is not even that bad.
The thing about 32k is that after taxes and overhead, it really isn't that much. That is 3 people working for 3 months. And the fact that this website didn't fall over when half a million people hit it means that they were doing something right.
Man, he is like the best person. I'm a huge fan of all the stuff he actually performs for the public (standup, TV shows, movie work), but I also love how he writes in situations like this. So good.
The whole point is that he IS a millionaire. It wouldn't be surprising if it was some poor college kid putting his work out there for cheap and refusing to treat fans like criminals.
This guy is one of only a few millionaires doing anything remotely like this. And it's important, because we need popular, revenue-generating artists like this to break the backs of the anachronistic, parasitic publishing industry. I hope in ten years -- no, five, maybe less -- this sort of thing is the norm, RIAA and MPAA are just some irrelevant alphabet-soup organizations people have never heard of.
Ask Stephen King what he thinks of the "parasitic publishing industry". You forget that they used to be, and in many cases still are, a good creator's path to fame and wealth. For that they take a portion of the revenue. Same as VCs, same as a lot of things.
If, in 5 years, there are no big publishers, labels or production houses to help artists bring products to market, it will be similar to when there is no VC funding available. Creativity and innovation will be stifled. You will get only the content made by people who also have the wherewithal to distribute it and do a phenomenal job marketing it themselves, who do not need a real budget to do so. There are a lot of good artists who do not fit that description. Try not to wish away their means to an end.
The majority of creation in many fields happen without a promise of getting paid.
Only a tiny minority of authors ever manage to sell their novels. Even a lot of successful published novels only gets out there because of the sheer persistence of the author in question in getting past rejection, not because of writing quality (a favorite anecdote of mine is how John Irving attempted repeatedly to get one of the short stories attributed to the fictional Garp published, only to get rejected over an over; in The World According to Garp, the short story in question was rejected, and John Irving had written a rejection letter for it. In the end he substituted one of the actual rejection letters for it. The short story went on to win a price in its own right)
Only a tiny minority of musicians ever get a record deal.
If anything, the current system is so focused on promoting the "big ones" that a lot of great creative works goes unknown because the big money goes towards building a culture focused on the top few.
It might not be the case in all fields (I happen to like a lot of the expensive effect-laden Hollywood movies, for example, and I have a harder time figuring out how the economics would work for that), but it is most decidedly not a given that creativity and innovation would be stifled in every fields. Some are likely to flourish.
Sure, but the same as your thoughts on expensive movies can be said for many a great album. I know some of my favorites would not be what they are if they had to be self-financed.
Those organizations are lobbying groups representing a clientele. They were never intended to be useful to anyone else. That being said, fair enough on your comments. Let's all hope that financing is still available for bands who want it, and it comes in a form that allows them more control and profit.
These are a couple of things he had to say in his e-mail: "I learned that money can be a lot of things. It can be something that is hoarded, fought over, protected, stolen and withheld. Or it can be like an energy, fueled by the desire, will, creative interest, need to laugh, of large groups of people. And it can be shuffled and pushed around and pooled together to fuel a common interest, jokes about garbage, penises and parenthood."
"...I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). 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, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again."
I really wanted to edit out parts of the paragraph above because it looked lengthy. However, it's worth your while to read his perspective. His reasons for doing this esp. from the second quote above are a lot deeper than just promotion.
Apparently you forgot your password? Ok, so here's your new one, stupid:
My generated password was prefixed with "idiot.THENEWPASSWORD". It's little touches like this that I find really nice.
Also, needless to say, I would buy one of his specials in a heartbeat should a similar offer come up in the future. I watched the special last night and it was outrageously funny.