When Pirates Pay, They Pay Good
Written by Ernesto on January 05, 2008Last week we reported on the release of Steal This Film 2, a documentary about the past, present and future of filesharing. The film is free to download, but people are encouraged to donate some money if they want to support future projects. Surprisingly, the pirates who decided to donate were quite generous.
Steal This Film 2 is produced by “The League of Noble Peers”. Part 2 is already a great success with over 150,000 downloads in the first 4 days. Interestingly, people are being very generous with their donations, which have already passed $5000.
When Part 1 was released, “The League of Noble Peers” asked downloaders to donate $1 (or more) if they wanted to support the project. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority donated just that. However, for the new release the majority donated $15 or more. Why? Well it could be that donators were motivated by a mystery gift they were offered when they gave more than $15, but there are alternative explanations as to why pirates may be more generous than people assume.
Jamie King, producer of the film gives the following explanation on his blog: “Over 90% of people donating are deciding to go over the artificial $15 threshold we set. But I don’t think people literally ‘want that gift’; I think they want an excuse to be generous!”
This could be true, the people who donate (still only a small percentage) are obviously dedicated to the cause, but there is more. It could also be that they donate more because they now don’t have an excuse to donate only $1, even pirates don’t want to look miserly. Most importantly perhaps, is that it shows that it can be wise to avoid psychological reactance, and leave the choice about what to donate or spend on a film or a music album up to the consumer. It is a challenge to build business models around free will and free content, but the Steal This Film project shows that there are opportunities.
Another interesting point raised by Jamie in his post is the need for alternative payment models. Sure, PayPal works but they take away too much money – it’s replacing one money sucking middleman with another. Take the Radiohead release for example, you could get the album virtually for free, but you still had to pay the credit card company nearly $1. This is probably why most people decided to pirate the album, instead of getting it for “free”. It seems that The Pirate Bay agrees on this, as they are working on a p2p based payment model that will probably be released by the and of this month.
TorrentFreak briefly talked to Brokep about this upcoming project a while ago, unfortunately we are not allowed to give you any more details, but it’s certainly an interesting project with a lot of potential. Brokep did reveal a bit on Jamie’s blog as he said: “I think that people will pay if there’s a simple solution. The payment solutions of today are not built for the new, network economy — they’re built around the old one. As we move away from the old economy, we’re here without a new payment solution.”
We will definitely keep you informed on this upcoming project. BitTorrent opens up possibilities for independent filmmakers. Distribution costs are now non-existent, and new business models are slowly starting to emerge. The future of film making looks bright and will be in part funded and formed by the innovators who were once called pirates.
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42 Responses
nice nice! :) Cant wait for the next one.
Death to the leeching middle hands!
Hope the system is easy and will spawn more creators into being active in their own distribution and things by themselves instead of wasting income for others to do it ;)
Sounds interesting!
i gave five bucks before i even watched the film.
why five? cause 15 is too much, and i really didn’t think they’d actually mail me any little trinkets anyway… the shipping alone would be more than 5 bucks anyhow….
also, that swarm was huge. i got my file super-quick BUT i didn’t feel like seeding at all, so i may have subconsciously guilted myself into chipping in the 5 bucks.
$5K for 150,000 downloads is a pittance. sure, some were generous, but most were complete scroooges.
peace!
Fascinating, especially the link to the reactance article. I’ve observed the same effect myself, but didn’t know it had a name.
I guess we can now summarize the two forms of distribution as:
Torrent your work (”new” media): Free download + publicity for doing something new + voluntary donations
Release a CD/DVD (”old” media): Free download anyway + legal threats + alienation of fans + reactance + donations only with high overhead (manufacturing, shipping, middlemen)
I know which way I’d like to release MY content…
Was a pretty good movie!
Bloody brilliant documentary! Production values are a thousand times more professional than the first part.
As good as anything broadcast on the gogglebox these days.
Roll on Part Three. =]
Amazing!
Really looking forward to see what kind of payment-method TPB will release! :)
“and of this month” should be “end of this month” I think
:)
re. comment 3: we WILL be sending out the gift packs! the reason it’s $15 and not $10 is that $5 was worst case scenario postage and packing.
When Pirates Pay, They Pay WELL
I speak English really good. :-/
[quote comment="256013"]When Pirates Pay, They Pay WELL
I speak English really good. :-/[/quote]
No shit…that was my first thought, also.
“When Pirates Pay, They Pay Real Goodly Like”….duuurrrrr….
that’s a good documentary.
ok, I really like to pay if I like what I watch but not beforehand. I didn’t watch any of the steal this movie series but I watched “Man from Earth” and I really liked it and I wanted to pay at least price of a theater ticket but this is not easy, if you live in my country you still need credit card to pay by paypal and I don’t have a credit card and I don’t like credit cards. Easy way of paying would be great.
WAN DAR PIRAZTZ PAI, DEMZ PAIZ REL GUD LIKE, YA NO?
It’s great that people are supporting STF.
The league of noble peers (us), needs to create our own digg.
Come on, step up. Digg is corporate controlled, people are banned without reason.
We need participant controlled social media. And Pirate Bay / League of Noble peers can help.
We decide the issues.
It can start off with open source pligg.
Email them and help the cause.
No corporate control. Freedom.
We need our own social media.
Watch it hd and on your iphone/ipod
http://www.ilovextra.com
“by the and of this month.”
change and to end
People might donate now to such projects, like In Rainbows and this, because it is new, and quite revolutionary. However, in the future when this becomes normal, it won’t have as much impact and therefore it won’t gather as much money.
Uh – the Radiohead album wasn’t “virtually free”, it was free as in people who didn’t want to pay for it didn’t pay a single cent. Unless you were paying money, you didn’t even provide credit card information, so there was no $1.00 fee involved.
“Take the Radiohead release for example, you could get the album virtually for free, but you still had to pay the credit card company nearly $1. This is probably why most people decided to pirate the album, instead of getting it for “free”.”
No, you didn’t – if you put in 0.00 as your amount to pay it didn’t even ask for your information.
“Take the Radiohead release [..] you still had to pay the credit card company nearly $1″
If you chose to pay $0, you weren’t asked for CC details, so that doesn’t make sense.
[quote comment="256241"]People might donate now to such projects, like In Rainbows and this, because it is new, and quite revolutionary. However, in the future when this becomes normal, it won’t have as much impact and therefore it won’t gather as much money.[/quote]
I suppose that is a possibility but I’m sure by then, long after the old regime of music is destroyed, we will have figured out a new revolutionary way to give artists a reasonable amount of money. Also don’t forget about merchendise and concerts!
Awesome article! I knew there was a more scientific name for the underlying principles of reverse psychology! XD
Btw, let’s be sure that our quality doesn’t decrease with our expansion of quantity: it’s pay well. Good is an adjective. (Unless you were trying to emulate the Cowboy imitation by John Cleese at the end of “A Fish Called Wanda,” in which case you would be absolutely right.)
Great documentary
I wonder if the new payment solution will be something like email money transfer (EMT). Send money to people with a simple email and security word.
http://www.interac.ca/consumers/productsandservices_ol_emt.php
I can actually say I donated $48 to the cause. Why?
1. I had the money left over from Christmas that I had already decided was going to something.
2. I love ideas and their presentation was well done.
3. We need things that shake everything up every once in awhile. Change the way we look at things. We need creators. Yes, the same creators making music/books/art/movies.
an economic drop box that I could set up as a bill payment account from my bank would do the trick. I pay my taxes, phone bill, etc this way. Why wouldn’t that work? Especially since free is an option, so they won’t restrict the item for download at time of purchase. I can watch what they offer and then make my decision on what it was worth to me. But don’t worry, I won’t expect payment to me if I feel they wasted my time ;-)
[quote comment="255945"]Bloody brilliant documentary! Production values are a thousand times more professional than the first part.
As good as anything broadcast on the gogglebox these days.
Roll on Part Three. =][/quote]
OMFG! I’m having severe chest pains after finding that Zarathustra and I finally agree on something!
Now, if he tells me that he actually donated, I’ll need the electroshock paddles.
Clear! :D
The radiohead section, in particular use of “free”, seems to imply that you had to pay the credit card fee even if you didn’t donate, which is false…
[quote comment="256221"]The league of noble peers (us), needs to create our own digg.
Come on, step up. Digg is corporate controlled, people are banned without reason.
We need participant controlled social media. And Pirate Bay / League of Noble peers can help.
We decide the issues.
It can start off with open source pligg.
Email them and help the cause.
No corporate control. Freedom.
We need our own social media.[/quote]
I agree with you 100%
Just imagine that for a minute.
I want to see this happen. I’m supporting this with $$ also.
I’d love to get more involved.
If you paid for the Radiohead download when you wanted it for free you did something wrong. I know for a fact you could get it from their site without even paying the credit card company.
Hey people
I have donated also an amount to the movie. Its the first movie in times that I pay for [ and its free ;) ], the great thing of this film his realizing how the world works. Just writing a paper on it. Will see how it goes. The film is a great inspiration for it, I am thinking that the Rabbit part of it has to be in it!
greetz
Having worked for a bank (in a previous life), I can confirm that if the film-makers, etc set up a normal bank account and made the sort code and account number available on the donations page, we could either make a donation through online banking or call into a branch of their bank (anywhere in the world) and pay a donation directly to them at no additional charge.
The account would be safe from identity theft AND we could donate anonymously… annonimously…anniminally… without anyone knowing who we are!
Anyone think that there’s a possibility of this payment system being similar to a Ripple/LETS style system?
http://ripple.sourceforge.net/
Hopefully they have come up with a way to make payments using cash instead of paypal/banks.
I haven’t used a bank in over 2 years… thoughs lieing, stealing, no good, husslers will never get another cent of my money.
We at Karmafan.com have been working on this problem for a while now. A system was release in September 2007.
The vision is that fans support the artists they like by sending money straight to the artists. The payment gateways include, PayPal, credit cards and mobile phones.
The fans get a badge showing who they have supported. Artists use a widget straight in their website, myspace, reverbnation page to prompt their fans to support them.
We do not keep a cut. Instead we believe the artists who benefit from Karmafan can in turn support us the same way they are able to gather support from their fans.
The response from the artists has been positive and encouraging. Seems like artists are more than ready to adopt a system where fans directly support them. We already have around 300 artists using the Karmfan widget. Go to myspace.com/karmafan . All our friends there are using the Karmafan widget.
3c per download is hardly generous, lol. But I guess the 5k total is the figure we should be looking at in this world of free filesharing.
So if we assume that 100% of donators gave an average of $15 (actually, 90% gave more than $15, but the other 10% donated less), that would mean out of 150,000 downloads, less than 350 people donated. That’s 0.2%. Does this mean 99.8% of everyone who downloaded the movie gave nothing? If you divide total contributions by total downloads, it would be an average of 30 cents per download. Does this even cover the cost of bandwidth?
The “Red vs. Blue” crew had this down years ago. Which isn’t to take anything away from the LoNP, since most people STILL can’t figure this one out.
The point is, people will give money more easily if they get something intangible from it. With RvB it’s a community thing, with LoNP it’s a bit of that, but also “what’s in the box?” which is an old game show staple.
OK, I’m going to go rest my cultural references now…
I simply don’t trust the internet with transactions. I mailed a donation to Canada for a Canadian forum becuas the only money I could lose that way would be in that envelope.
while i dont doubt many of the donations were from “pirates” im pretty sure like most things not ALL were. try to write more intelligent stories than this trash plz.
[quote comment="255942"]Fascinating, especially the link to the reactance article. I’ve observed the same effect myself, but didn’t know it had a name.
I guess we can now summarize the two forms of distribution as:
Torrent your work (”new” media): Free download + publicity for doing something new + voluntary donations
Release a CD/DVD (”old” media): Free download anyway + legal threats + alienation of fans + reactance + donations only with high overhead (manufacturing, shipping, middlemen)
I know which way I’d like to release MY content…[/quote]
Its the wish of users. U must remember that this project is not commercially driven. So ur comments are highly unfortunate
[quote comment="256379"][quote comment="255945"]Bloody brilliant documentary! Production values are a thousand times more professional than the first part.
As good as anything broadcast on the gogglebox these days.
Roll on Part Three. =][/quote]
OMFG! I’m having severe chest pains after finding that Zarathustra and I finally agree on something!
Now, if he tells me that he actually donated, I’ll need the electroshock paddles.
Clear! :D[/quote]
Get the crash cart – STAT!
(I sure did =] )
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