The (Monty) Pythons raid YouTube, displacing poor-quality rip-offs of scenes from their films on the site by adding official, high-quality rip-offs. Are they mad? Well, they’re certainly richer. Their DVD sales have increased by 23 000 percent.
25Jan09 — 4
Interesting, but… the link to Amazon, I think that’s the key, not the fact that now it’s high-quality snippets. And also note that the increase was temporary (was it a front-page feature?) as the bestselling complete box set is back down to #1,094 on Amazon.com as I write (no idea whether that’s higher than before, but then I’ve also no idea if Python always gets a boost in the run-up to Christmas, being an ideal gift).
Also also, not all the poor-quality ones have been replaced, and all of the non-official ones I checked have ads (not links on them, just ads for Cisco and eBay and what not) – I assume the Pythons get a cut of those as well, but on what terms? Just because they’ve got a temporary sales boost doesn’t mean they aren’t getting exploited. And driving the traffic to Amazon might not help the consumer – do you think other sites that sell Python DVDs saw an increase or a drop in sales?
Thanks for this. I have corrected my post accordingly. I was writing it based on my memory of previous reports.
A gateway drug, no?
Interesting story, with a moral.
Maybe the music industry could learn to live with the Internet, instead of trying to bash it over the head the whole time.
They (the music industry) sure as hell don’t have much of a future on their current business model.