The $5 Experiment did not fix Louis C.K’s Massive Piracy Problem

The $5 Experiment was a simple yet powerful idea:

Louis C.K: “If I put out a brand new standup special at a drastically low price ($5) and make it as easy as possible to buy, download and enjoy, free of any restrictions, will everyone just go and steal it?”

It’s a hands-off solution to a seemingly impossible problem. The below data from Google’s Keyword Checker paints a very grim picture of Louis’s current piracy situation. According to this data, there are a total of 12,973 pirate searches and 1,610 buyer searches every month on Google. This means that for every 1 person looking to buy his content, there are 8 people looking to pirate it, a piracy rate of 89%. According to the MPA, the average piracy rate in the U.S is 7%.

This piracy is so incredibly prevalent that when doing a Google search for one of his recent stand up specials: ‘louis ck shameless”, Google ranks the pirated version of the special that’s hosted on YouTube higher than the purchase page on Amazon.

Louis C.K’s answer to the Torrenting problem

Even the most advanced DRM mechanisms developed by companies like EA Games, Ubisoft, Adobe, and Microsoft are eventually broken and released on torrent sharing sites. If the worlds largest tech companies have failed (miserably) at stopping the illegal distribution of their content, then how is someone with limited resources going to stop or at least deter the pirates? His answer is simple: Don’t be a dick to people and they will treat you fairly. In his popular plea on the sales page for ‘Live at the Beacon Theatre’, he basically says: Hey, I went out of my way to make this really convenient and ridiculously affordable, now please reciprocate by dropping a few bucks for my hard work.

It’s a reasonable plea, and with the help of four front page Reddit submissions and countless news coverage, it has been a resounding success. It has produced $650,000 in just four days and that’s not even the best part. Since Louis self-published the content, completely cutting out the middleman (other than PayPal), he receives nearly 100% of the profit.

So, did the $5 experiment help at least?

It did not decrease piracy, in fact, it had the opposite effect. It generated so much attention to pirating that ‘Live at the Beacon Theatre’ was the most pirated Louis C.K torrent hands down.

But here’s the twist: In just 4 days, “Live at the Beacon Theatre” has sold 130,000 copies, rapidly outpacing his previous comedy specials. This is particularly impressive since his previous films were distributed by media giants such as HBO and Comedy Central. Does this mean that pirating can lead to increased sales? Even though the data is quite compelling, there are other factors at play here:

The huge amount of sales may be due to the extensive media attention to his $5 experiment. Going Viral = Tons of Exposure = Tons of sales.
Several people have complained of technical issues and slow downloading speeds on Louis C.K’s website so they downloaded it via torrent.
With his special reaching such high popularity among the internet savy population, it makes sense that it would receive an equally high amount of pirating.

Louis C.K has managed to do with his $5 Experiment what the MPAA hasn’t been able to do in its 30+ years of antipiracy efforts: Confront piracy in a way that increases sales without:

Threatening and suing fans.
Investing millions of dollars in DRM technologies.
Investing $45 million per year into anti-piracy ad campaigns & lawsuits.