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Comment by interlagos | Hacker News Reader

Remember The Plant?

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/00/11/30/1238204/stephen-king...

I remember The Plant. Stephen King made over $700,000 writing a partial novel which he declined to finish not because it didn't turn a profit, but because his download statistics didn't show the opt-in payment ratios he wanted.

It's an instructive example of hubris and mis-aligned goals. Stephen wasn't interested in generating a profit. Had he raised the same revenue with half as many readers paying twice as often he would have continued the project.

It is also an instructive example of novelty. His initial experiment was reported very widely, and tens or hundreds of thousands lined up to "prove it could work", putting their dollars to demonstrate it.

Once the novelty wore off, the viability of the approach disappeared. The opt-in payment ratios started generously, and rapidly approached zero.

Little can be learned from CK's experiment because it was novel -- it got covered far and wide, encouraging a lot of people to "show" that the model works.

That's an interesting theory but I'm not convinced it has a factual basis. Maybe readers decided that King's book just sucked and were waiting for it to improve? Neither you nor I can draw a meaningful conclusion on that point.

What can be demonstrated, empirically, is that money can be made without imposing draconian controls.

Empirically what has been shown is that if you do an IAMA on Reddit leading up to the release of your "experiment", a lot of people will play along. It does not carry over to any other release, and says absolutely nothing about DRM or atypical release plans.

Lots of people sell videos online without the middle man. Most see no sales.

"It does not carry over to any other release, and says absolutely nothing about DRM or atypical release plans"

This is demonstrably false. In fact, every artist who's ever done an online release of their content without DRM has seen sales in proportion to their general popularity. We've seen this with Radiohead, with NIN, and with many other lesser artists.

In every case, the profits were roughly in line with the general popularity of the artist's content.

"Lots of people sell videos online without the middle man. Most see no sales."

And most content distributed through the various middle-man networks likewise is a failure. Most OSS software is a flop. Most commercial software is also a flop. This statement is neither surprising nor relevant.

I'm not sure that one can really compare a written story sold on the internet over a decade ago, before pretty much anybody had a decent reader for such things, with a video being sold online today when literally tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of people own the right equipment for viewing it comfortably.

The comparison is the hype, delivery, and conclusions. After the initial release of the Plant there was much fanfare about its demonstrated validation of a sales model, yet it was a completely atypical example that earned tremendous publicity and enhanced engagement because it was novel.

Sure, The Plant was an experiment with a completely new and novel sales model that ended up falling flat. Meanwhile Louis CK is selling videos online in a world where millions of people buy videos online, but with the barely novel gimmick of selling direct instead of through intermediaries. (Something tons of people have done before, some with great success.) I really don't see the similarity.

That barely novel gimmick got it front and center of every social news site. Indeed, why are we even talking about this experiment if it were "barely novel"? This submission and every comment in it is a counterpoint to your claim.

A fascinating question! I think we're all talking about it because Louis CK is pretty popular.

None of this is a counterpoint to my claim. A counterpoint to my claim would be actually showing that it is novel, e.g. that this experiment contains attributes which have not been seen before.

People have produced and sold videos direct over the internet many times before, so that aspect isn't new. Is there some other aspect to this which I'm missing which is novel?

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