What’s surprising about this example is how unsurprising it is. Response videos, mashups, and remixes spread, and a new generation learned the proper meaning of “Killer Rabbit.” And all this cost Monty Python essentially nothing, since YouTube paid all the bandwidth and storage costs, such as they were. Thousands of viewers were reminded how much they loved Monty Python and wanted more, so they ordered the DVDs. More than 2 million people watched the clips on YouTube as word of mouth spread and parents introduced their children to the Black Knight and the Dead Parrot Sketch. 2 on Amazon’s Movies and TV best-sellers list, with increased sales of 23,000 percent.įree worked, and worked brilliantly. Three months later, the results of this rash experiment with free were in. 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. None of your driveling, mindless comments. And what’s even more, we’re letting you see absolutely everything for free.

What’s more, we’re taking our most viewed clips and uploading brand new high quality versions. We’re giving you the real thing-high quality videos delivered straight from our vault. No more of those crap quality videos you’ve been posting. 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. We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell. It’s time for us to take matters into our own hands.

For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube.

The future of a radical price