Can a person make money by offering a paid video download via the Internet? If you are comedian Louis CK, the answer is, "Yes." A few days ago he released a concert video of a recent performance in New York City via his web site. The video cost just $5 and didn"t have any DRM set up. The only limits were that you could stream the video twice from the web site and downloaded it twice from the site.
On Tuesday, Louis CK posted up an update on the video"s downloads and overall sales. He revealed that the production of the video, which he directed, cost $170,000 which he says was mostly paid for via tickets to see the live shows that were taped for the video download. The actual construction of the web site to host the video download cost about $32,000.
At the time of his post, Louis CK said that there have been 110,000 downloads of the video, generating revenues of $500,000. Minus the production costs, the web site costs and charges to Paypal, Louis CK says that the video has now created a profit, so far, of $200,000.
Louis CK believes that this proves that the Internet can be a place to earn some money via video if the cost is kept low enough so that consumers can purchase the video without the need to pirate it. He states, "I really hope people keep buying it a lot, so I can have s***loads 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. "