Louis C.K. continues to publicly prove the points championed by the likes of Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk: build your own audience, connect with them, interact with them, let them in on the your secrets, and success will follow.
And, not only does he let us in on how it’s going, he tells us what he’s going to do with the money:
hi. So it’s been about 12 days since the thing started and yesterday we hit the crazy number. One million dollars. That’s a lot of money. Really too much money. I’ve never had a million dollars all of a sudden. and since we’re all sharing this experience and since it’s really your money, I wanted to let you know what I’m doing with it. People are paying attention to what’s going on with this thing. So I guess I want to set an example of what you can do if you all of a sudden have a million dollars that people just gave to you directly because you told jokes.
So I’m breaking the million into four pieces.
the first 250k is going to pay back what the special cost to produce and the website to build.
The second 250k is going back to my staff and the people who work for me on the special and on my show. I’m giving them a big fat bonus.
The third 280k is going to a few different charities. They are listed below in case you’d like to donate to them also. Some of these i learned about through friends, some were reccomended through twitter.
That leaves me with 220k for myself. Some of that will pay my rent and will care for my childen. The rest I will do terrible, horrible things with and none of that is any of your business. In any case, to me, 220k is enough out of a million.
I never viewed money as being “my money” I always saw it as “The money” It’s a resource. if it pools up around me then it needs to be flushed back out into the system.
The thing is still on sale. I hope folks keep buying it. If I make another million, I’ll give more of it away. I’ll let you know when that happens because I like you getting to know what happened to your 5 dollars and bringing awareness to the bla bla bla.
Okay I really gotta go now. Thank you again. I will now stop bugging you. I really hate being in the news this much so I’m gonna just disappear for a while.
Happy hollidays.
Louis C.K.
Yes, Louis is very funny. But so are a lot of people. Louis has managed to do something few others could. Even comedians far more famous and successful probably couldn’t pull this off, because they haven’t spent the time to build that connection. This “experiment” hasn’t been this successful merely because Louis offered his standup for $5, with no DRM (although that certainly helped). It wasn’t successful just because it was a novel way to distribute content (and, it wasn’t even novel… Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead did this years ago, and smaller bands before that). Those who cite these reasons miss the point.
Louis’ experiment has been successful because he’s busted his ass to build a group of people that want him to succeed. He did that, in part, by being transparent, both in his comedy, and in everything that goes on in the background. Aside from the technical angle of this, I’m sure Louis had to invest very little time actually selling this thing. When you spend the thousands and thousands of hours up front, just to build your tribe, they end up wanting to please you.
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CK’s easily one of the top 2-3 comedians performing today. And the fact that he is extremely hands on with technology helps. He mined Reddit for an enormous amount of traffic when he launched the experiment – did an AMA and there were at least three different threads about him on the first page during that week.
But yes, your argument is spot on: he got to where he is by being upfront and transparent about whatever he was doing. You could see that this is a guy who likes to do his own editing and production, who was paying for this out of his own pocket, and who understood that piracy isn’t as cut-and-dry as it’s often made out to be. If he’d thrown up an impersonal sales page, I doubt he would’ve had even half those numbers. The fact that he was so forthright about his experiment and its eventual results will have definitely earned him thousands of new fans who’ll no doubt devour whatever he releases next.
I didn’t know about the AMA during the launch, but he had done a massive amount of that kind of stuff in the past, in order to build up those loyal fans. And, shrewdly, he turned the sale itself into an opportunity to connect with those new fans as well.