Recently we posted that actor and comedian Louis C.K. was going to make his latest live show available to his audience for streaming or downloading directly for $5. Now, a few weeks later, Louis is reporting that those individual $5 sales have been adding up, to over a million dollars. On his website, he explains how he is going to divvy up the cash into four parts. Part one will go to paying for the show’s production, part two will result in “a big fat bonus” for the folks who work for him, part three will be split to several charities and the rest will go to his children and his rent (and “terrible, horrible things with and none of that is any of your business”).
If you haven’t seen it (and you really should, it’s very funny), the show is still available for a $5 download. Also available now is free artwork for making a DVD disc and box cover from the download.
I really hope people keep buying it a lot, so I can have shitloads of money, but at this point I think we can safely say that the experiment really worked. If anybody stole it, it wasn’t many of you. Pretty much everybody bought it. And so now we all get to know that about people and stuff. I’m really glad I put this out here this way and I’ll certainly do it again. If the trend continues with sales on this video, my goal is that i can reach the point where when I sell anything, be it videos, CDs or tickets to my tours, I’ll do it here and I’ll continue to follow the model of keeping my price as far down as possible, not overmarketing to you, keeping as few people between you and me as possible in the transaction.
(Of course i reserve the right to go back on all of this and sign a massive deal with a company that pays me fat coin and charges you straight up the ass.). (This is you: yes Louie. And we’ll all enjoy torrenting that content. You fat sweaty dolt).
I probably sound kind of crazy right now. It’s been a really fun and intense few days. This video was paid for by people who bought tickets, and then bought by people who wanted to see that same show. I got to do exactly the show I wanted, and exactly the show you wanted.
Check out what an over $1M Paypal balance looks like:
