Yep, The Free Model Just Totally Sucks
Via Gizmodo, Boing Boing, and other channels, the story of how the surviving members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus decided how to fight the tide of low-quality clips of their work showing up on YouTube.
Rather than the usual take-down notices and lawsuit threats, they made a huge selection of high quality clips freely available in their own channel, pointing out that the proper thing for those who enjoy the laugh-chuckles to do would be to buy the DVDs. They increased sales by 23,000%, or a 230 times growth factor.
Now I haven’t seen any absolute numbers, so it could be that they went from 10 units a week to 2300 units a week, and that’s less impressive than if they went from 1000 to 230,000 … no, you know what? It’s freakin’ impressive no matter what the baseline number was.
No doubt there will eventually be a plateau effect, when everybody who was ever willing to buy the collected Monty Python DVDs has done so, and the addition of new consumers occurs at a much lesser rate than the giant rush of pent-up demand that we’ve just seen rushing out into the channels of commerce like a huge, metaphor-laden thing.
But from my perspective, it’s just another example of the rewards possible when you provide compelling & quality content, develop a relationship with your audience, give them a means to support you, and invite them to do so.
- Speaking of the free model, it allows cool toys and remixes of content that I like. Say, panels eight and nine of this Octopus Pie, which now invites your own contributions of words to horrify Eve Ning.
- Also vaguely on the idea of free — El Santo at Webcomic Overlook interviewed comics creator (and Zuda contestant) Neil Kleid, and started out with what seems to be the new baseline when discussing independence vs. publishers in webcomics: Spike’s Greater 1% Theory. Interesting read.
- Nothing to do with free at all, but probably the last bit of inaugurania, from xkcd.
[…] (Link via Gary Tyrrell.) […]
By Journalista - the news weblog of The Comics Journal » Blog Archive » Jan. 27, 2009: With great power comes great liability on 01.27.09 9:16 am
Thanks for the link. From the page source on the pythonline site:
@import "/misc/drupal.css"
So it looks like the Pythons are running on Python
By Mark on 02.05.09 12:06 am
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