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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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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