January 23, 2009

Monty Python Proves Free Stuff Boosts Sales, Silly Walks Still Funny

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mojo-pythonchannel.jpgIt’s been a recurring theme around MoJo (and in my life) to impress upon people the seemingly counterintuitive notion that giving your creative output away for free can often increase sales, something the music industry misunderstood disastrously and only now is begrudgingly coming around on. But it’s rare we’re given such a clear, obvious example of this theory, like the one Boing Boing pointed to over on Mashable. After being frustrated by thousands of YouTube users posting stuff without permission, venerable British comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus created their own YouTube channel with a whole bunch of their sketches and shows on it. As the Pythons put it in a statement on the site:

For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube. Now the tables are turned. It’s time for us to take matters into our own hands. We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell. But being the extraordinarily nice chaps we are, we’ve figured a better way to get our own back: We’ve launched our own Monty Python channel on YouTube. No more of those crap quality videos you’ve been posting. We’re giving you the real thing – HQ videos delivered straight from our vault.

We’re letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there! But we want something in return. None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.

So, what happened? Did a greedy public return all their videos and sit comfortably at home, chuckling over how much money they’re saving? Nope. In fact, the presence of the YouTube page seemed to help increase their DVD sales “by 23,000 percent,” with a DVD jumping up to #2 on Amazon this week. Like Mashable said, nobody thinks owners of copyrighted content “should give everything away for free and simply hope that the fans will send them money.” But it’s clear that “cracking down” on what looks to our not-quite-caught-up-with-the-internet brains like a copyright violation can most definitely harm your bottom line, while going with the flow can help it. Either way, it also means we now can embed Python sketches here to our hearts’ delight. After the jump: Money, Bicycle Repairman, Every Sperm is Sacred!

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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