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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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He makes it seem like he won't be using that list:

> and they would have owned your private information for their own use.

> You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.

And I think Louis CK is going to be Louis CK's EP from now on.

EDIT: Forgot about the "don't contact me" default on the purchase screen.

When you go to the purchase screen you can choose between "contact me," and "don't contact me." To Louis' credit the default is "don't contact me," but I as a fan actually opted in to receive future notifications. I fully expect to be notified next time this opportunity arises (and I am probably not alone).

I opted in as well. I was sort of disappointed that the results of the "opt-out sub-experiment" weren't discussed in this statement. He's mentioned it in interviews - on NPR and repeatedly on reddit, at least - that he's got huge feedback on that little decision. It's also something that people, present company included, love to talk about. It would be interesting to see how many people decided to opt-in because he defaulted to opt-out.

He made the list opt in, so if you didn't want to hear from it that was the default.

You can opt into getting emails from him, when you make the purchase.

I'm curious where you're getting the 20k figure from. He mentions only that he's sold over 110k copies, but not what percentage of people opted in to the mail list.

Its a guesstimate based on what clients of mine or I get for opt-in in similar situations, with a discount based on his customer population disproportionately being Redditors or demographically similar to them. I figured "Meh, 20% sounds about right."

Fair enough.

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).

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