One more person has discovered, like Baen, that if you release your content inexpensively and without DRM, you can beat piracy at its own game. Comedian Louis CK recently tried an experiment in which he made a full-length comedy special available for sale from his website, to stream or download with no DRM, for $5. He asked that people be considerate and not pirate it, so that he could afford to offer more material in the same way.
Now Louis has posted some results to his website. (Though as a web designer he makes a better comedian; I had to use Evernote Clearly to read the annoying red-on-black text.) In the four days since it went on sale, it has sold 110,000 “units”, earning $550,000. It was a live show and tickets mostly covered its original cost. Louis says that after hosting and PayPal costs, he currently has a profit of over $200,000.
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.
He notes that “[if] anybody stole it, it wasn’t many of you. Pretty much everybody bought it.” He is very excited about the success of his experiment, and plans to try making other content available that way if all continues to go well.
How about that? If you don’t treat the customer like a potential thief, not to mention sucker, you can sell cheaply and openly and still make a profit. And the video’s only been on sale for four days; who knows how many units it will sell in a month or a year?
Of course, as CNet points out, not every artist can do what Louis has. For one thing, he’s famous already (a viral video of his appearance on Conan and a TV show he stars in have helped), and he is able to produce his own content (shades of e-book self publishers, eh?). And he also has novelty on his side—he’s the only one out there trying something like that right now. If everybody does it, will their experiments prove as successful? Or will people just consider it the new status quo and go right back to pirating?
(Found via TheNextWeb.)
Speaking of Louis CK’s viral video, I thought I had mentioned it here before, when last I discovered it, but I can’t seem to find it in a search of the site, so I guess I didn’t. The comedian talks about how much technology has changed the world in his lifetime, and how ungrateful we all are at how “amazing” the world is now. “When I was a kid, we had a rotary phone. We had a phone you had to stand next to, and you had to dial it. You ever realize, how primitive—? You’re making sparks, in a phone.”
It puts me in mind of people who complain about some of the features of e-books while paying no mind to the fact that you can now carry as many books in your pocket as might have made up the entire library of an educated man a few decades ago. And the books that people used to consider to be the Classics, the very foundation of all rational thought in the Western world, are all free. (But how little we ever take advantage of that!)
I still don’t understand the concept of Why classics are free. Why “public domain” exists.
For a brief introduction to PD, see the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain . For a book length treatment on the dangers of eliminating the PD, see James Boyle’s book _The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind_, with a link in the above article.
For a practical example, think of the effort of keeping track of all of Shakespeare’s heirs and making sure they got their percentage of all profits of plays, movies and other adaptations since his death. Or find _Melancholy Elephants_ on Spider Robinson’s website for a literary treatment. All our cultures – including Walt Disney’s movies – are built on the public domain.