06 Dec How Comedian Louis CK Made $1 Million Online In 12 Days
[bd_dropcap]L[/bd_dropcap] ouis CK is now one of my favourite comedians, but when I think about it, I’m pretty sure I only heard about him through the attention this campaign got.
Louis CK made over one million dollars in 12 days, when he released a new stand up video for only $5 through his own website a few years ago.
He opted to distribute it himself, free of any regional rights and made it incredibly easy for people to purchase it. No email signup or “create a new account” stuff.
It took him 4 days to clear $200,000 and on the 12th day, he had cleared the million dollar mark. And he did very little online advertising to achieve this.
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so it’s at the top of my feed here LIVE AT THE BEACON is up at http://t.co/JL0O24ZY for $5. no DRM no spam no joining a thing.
— Louis C.K. (@louisck) December 11, 2011
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In fact, the steps Louis took go against a lot of what traditional marketers probably would have suggested. But it worked. Does that mean that digital and online marketing don’t work, no. It means something totally different.
I really hope people keep buying it a lot, [bd_themecolor] so I can have shitloads of money [/bd_themecolor], 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. – Louis CK
I believe this is an example of an old business model merging with a new. It didn’t really take Louis CK 12 days to break the million. It took him about 20 or 30 years to get to this point.
It took him years to build up the almost 3 million Twitter followers and the 500k Facebook likes. And he didn’t aquire them through sharing funny cat pictures online, he did it over years of getting up in front of people and making a direct impact on their lives.
What are you doing offline?
Louis is an example of how important it is to be doing something interesting and exciting offline, to generate interest online.
Online is another platform, another channel to distribute what you have. If you have a well crafted product, service or entertainment piece, that has been refined over numerous years, then yes, online will work.
If you then make the process as easy as possible for people to get their hands on that, without internruppting them too many times or “overmarketing” to them, then the online world can be incredibly successful.