Louis C.K's email to his Beacon Theater Show customers
danwin.com
danwin.com
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...
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.
Nothing was over produced, human from start to finish
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.
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.
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.
That means it had 100,000 downloads in 5 days, each d/l 1/2 gig maybe (I have no idea of the bitrate/size used)?
You need someone who's done that before, plus all the other stuff like actually designing it and that's going to cost you.
It might look a little high, but I think it was probably worth it.
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
Also, that figure might include the cost for bandwidth that it has cost to serve up the 1.2 GB file.
[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)
The $32,000 number quoted at that point is not even that bad.
But let's not pretend Louis C.K. is not a millionaire, because he is, and we're essentially giving him promotion for free.
I'm okay with that, just be aware of what we are doing.
He's not some poor independent artist that needs help to be discovered.
Nobody said he was....
"But let's not pretend Louis C.K. is not a millionaire, because he is, and we're essentially giving him promotion for free."
Why are you acting like this is a bad thing?
He's brilliant and paving the way for artists to make money. He is the Trent Reznor of his field.
Reznor on "what to do as a new / unknown artist": http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?30,767183,767183
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.
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.
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.
Then those organizations (riaa/mpaa) will have to be useful or die.
"...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.
BTW: Louis C.K. is super awesome!