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?
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.