#133 - Sam's Black Friday Email Results, Lean Media Businesses That Make Millions, and Celebrity Death Match for Tik-Tok
Uh-huh. Yeah, I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no days off.
On the road, let's travel, never looking back. We're here. What up, Sam? How you doing?
Hi. You want to talk about, uh, what transpired on Wednesday?
On Wednesday? Oh yeah, after the, uh, after our podcast recording with the— about the Black Friday tactic that I was telling you about. Then you were like, I'm going to do it. And then what happened?
I did it and I got all the credit. So I first want to say I stole from Sean. Sean stole from Brooklyn.
Actually, technically I stole from my friend Ben who works with me, my partner Ben. Ben was like, stole it from Brooklyn and Brooklyn stole it from Chubby's. Chubby stole it from— probably it all goes back to like Sugarman, you know, something like that.
So I want to say, I want to give a 90% thank you to you for giving me the idea. I got all the credit, but you should get the credit. And then you could give like a 90% thank you to all your people. So kind of like trickles down. Yeah, exactly. So I sent it out and it worked so good. It, uh, I got a text from Andrew Wilkinson. I got a text from, um, coworkers and they're like, dude, you just sent this out to the whole list.
That's hilarious. People actually believe it because this year I saw, so we did it. Like I was saying last time, we did it with our e-com business. But I saw 3 or 4 different companies try this, including you guys. So, you know, I think the jig is up. It's all still will probably work again next year, one more year. And I think it's like everybody's burnt on this tactic.
I think you could keep doing a different iteration of it.
So the principle will still work.
So I set mine to like 250,000 people and we made, I'll just say, 7 figures. Yeah. So here's a few things I learned. The first thing is that like we normally discount trends and we actually discount it way too much. We need to raise the prices. This needs to be way more expensive. But we did it this one time and shockingly, not really anyone was angry that they didn't get a discount prior. So which I— that was my biggest reason for not ever wanting to discount. I didn't want to be disrespectful to old people. They didn't care. But I got literally 1,000 emails of people saying either this email is awesome, you're a piece of shit, this is a scam, why are you scamming people? And my reply was like, dude, jokes aren't scams. Like, this is clearly like a joke. And then the third one was like, oh my gosh, Sam, this is not meant for me. Like, people who are concerned. What type of replies did you get? Actually, Sean, should we give the background of this?
Yeah, let's do it. So people who, 'cause we can't assume everyone follows the whole, every episode.
So on Wednesday, Sean has an e-com business and he told me about this sales tactic that he was gonna do where he was going to email his list this thing and where the subject says, "Needs approval," and the body of the text said, "Hey team, our Black Friday sales ready to roll. The email's below. Can you please click through and make sure all the links work fine?" let me know, Sean. And it was supposed to be an internal email and it was like a mistake as if it was sent to the entire list. Sean told me about that and immediately we were like, oh, we gotta do that. So that's what we did. So how'd it go for you?
For us, it was great. It was our biggest sales day and it was like 2 weeks before Black Friday. So you get to double dip Black Friday basically. And I did it a little bit differently. So, so you did it like the exact Brooklyn and tactic, like needs approval, blah, blah, blah. We changed it up, like the text at least, but same result, same effect, because it's the same principle in play. And what we did was we followed up with, oh my God, this discount isn't supposed to be live. We over-engineered it. We didn't need to do this. We sent it to a handful of people that we knew are chatterboxes. They're always super active everywhere in the community. And so we sent it to just a few of them. They immediately ran and said, oh my God, guys, did you see this? And then we were like, oh no, you found it. This is in the public, like Facebook group or whatever, where there's a lot of people there. And we're like, well, you know, we told our developer to fix it, but you know, hey, while it's live, fair game, go for it. This will hopefully have it fixed in a couple hours. So that time urgency of like, get it before the bug gets fixed was like insane. And so this worked really well. So that's what I was telling you. And you were like, I was just telling you to brag. And then you were like, oh dude, we're going to do that. That's great. That's a great idea. And then you posted some crazy stats on Twitter as it was going, which I think is great. It amplifies That's an amplifier, right? You're talking about what's going on, which amplifies the interest in it. And you showed a screenshot of like 300,000 people on a website in real time. That can't be right. That is fake.
That was fake.
Okay.
Thank you. I thought that number, but we did have about 5,000. I thought that 300,000 was a high. So look, I was like playing this kind of douchey.
You went all in, which is great.
Like banging my chest. I thought I was doing it so obnoxiously that most people could understand that it was a joke. So we had this whole thing planned out. This like, and we had already written out all the emails and then Sean told me his idea and I was like, oh, that's way better. So I called Steph, I go, Steph, we're gonna do this right now. Fuck it. Like we're doing this right now. And I just wrote up the email, I sent it and like we went with the shtick of I sent out the email saying check this and then I pooped on Twitter. Oh my God, I totally screwed up. My fat fingers have got me in trouble. I've sent this to everyone. Hurry up and buy it or something like that. And then the follow-up was, "Oh my God, I can't believe I just sent you that. My coworkers are gonna kill me, unless of course you buy now." You know what? 2020 was a hard year. We're doing it live. We're keeping it up. So for the next 500 people, you get this price. After that, it rises to this price, and then it rises to this price.
I think personally it's 30% good marketing psychology, and 70% was it was actually a sick discount. So there's probably a lot of people who, if you had just said, Hey, Black Friday sale, $99 for Trends, I think you would have got probably half the response that you got. So I think maybe this was 50% marketing and 50% amazing deal for good value. Like people who were on the fence and this was enough to push them over the edge to give it a shot. So I'll split the credit there.
It worked out well. I'm happy we did it.
It, uh, all right. I look forward to my Christmas gift.
Yeah, we do owe you.
That's for sure. What else we got? Uh, unless you had anything else on that one. No, you wanted to do Drudge, right?
Yeah. So you want to take the lead?
Yeah, I'll tee it up. So I put this on there because you had told me about Drudge. I had heard the name. I didn't even know anything about Drudge Report, but there was this very interesting thing that came out, an article that came out, I think this week, and somebody basically dug into, like, what the hell happened to Drudge?
And there's— what is Drudge, Sean?
The Drudge is— Drudge Report is like kind of like a news aggregator. It's a bunch of links on a page that was predominantly for, like, kind of right-wing sometimes conspiracy, but definitely like right-wing conservative news articles. And it became super, super popular. It was really early, kind of like, when was it, '90s? Like when it started, started in the '90s. And it became like the influential place. If you were in the middle of the page, if your link was like 40 links down, 30 links down, you could still get like a million page views just by being on Drudge.
So it was like a link aggregator, but they did break some news stories. So they were the first to accuse Bill Clinton, I think, of sleeping with Monica Lewinsky. So they did get some—
even better, they broke broke the story that I think Newsweek had squashed a story about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. So not only was it like the president had an affair with a staffer in the White House, but mainstream media squashed it. We are going to release the truth, release the kraken here. So they had a few big breakthrough moments like that early on, which helped them get big. And then this thing was basically talking about these 3 or 4 points that were kind of like a Drudge takedown. It was basically like, if you look at Drudge, it's no longer right wing. To the point where some people think it's been bought by a lefty billionaire, which goes into point 2, which is that like Matt Drudge doesn't work there anymore or he's sold it and he's a pretty like kind of stealthy character. So nobody knows, nothing's confirmed, but this is a rumor and suspicion. Then the third one was like they're inflating their page views and they have some like nefarious ad practices where they're like, if you're on the page, they'll auto refresh the page like ridiculously fast, which drives up their page view count or drives up their ad impressions count. And they say it's for like showing you the new links, but like, it's like ridiculously fast auto reload. Nobody would do that. And there were some other things in the ad, like about ad IDs, a bunch of really nerdy stuff that it got into.
So let's even, let's give it a little bit more background. And I took this from the article you posted. So basically who, who wrote this?
Uh, we'll give them credit.
What was it on? It looked like a good site.
Table, Table, uh, tabletmag.com.
I'd never heard of it. Never heard of this. So. Drudge Report, it's basically a one-page website that would just links. That's all it is. And in 2004, on Election Day, it got 36 million views, uniques in one day. Previously, it was updated once to twice a day with as many as 40 to 50 links per day. And if you, like Sean said, if you were like in the middle, if you were just a link there, you could get millions of views and they guessed that it was making some number between $10 and $30 million a year in ad revenue and had been doing so since the '90s. And it only had 3 or 4 employees, one of them being Matt Drudge, who would actually post the links in the day. He would like go surfing and post the links and then just chill all day. And he had a pretty like chill lifestyle, but there's one-man media operation that kind of controlled the, at least the conservative movement, or at least some portion of it.
Yes, exactly. And there's a whole bunch of stuff in this article. This article was like, it was like 5 conspiracies baked into one article. Like, they could have split it out as like a 5-part series as far as I'm concerned, because it was like, there's this couple, the Ottos, OTTO. Like, they live in Mountain View, California. Who are they? Why do they live in Mountain View? Why are they associated with Drudge? If you call the Drudge help hotline, it goes directly to this woman's phone number. Now it's got changed after I called it the first time. And in 2019, he randomly changed the ad agency that worked with this to this company owned by the Ottos. The autos have no background in ads. So why would he do this? Like a $20 million property or like, you know, ad revenue? Why would he switch it on a dime to somebody else? Didn't even tell the original agency why. There's all this like stuff like, do they actually own Drudge? Is that why it's changed? Who are they linked to? You know, this guy, he's the ex-CTO to the CTO at Google. It's like, what the hell? What's going on over here? So there was just a whole bunch of interesting things. I wanted to hear your reaction to this overall. And I would say there is an idea paired with this or an opportunity paired with this, which is they reference that there's been a whole bunch of other sites that are trying to replace Drudge as like the real right-wing news aggregator. We're what Drudge used to be before Drudge like went left. And I think that's kind of cool and interesting. I was watching— I was looking at a couple of those.
So yeah, let's talk about the opportunity and then my opinion after, or like what my takeaway is. But in terms of opportunity, so these link aggregation websites are awesome. I mean, at the end of the day, The Hustle is that, and it's an 8-figure business doing that. We have this thing in our daily email called Snippets, which we literally just take a headline and we put it in there and we say, you know, from Bloomberg. That's usually always the most engaged thing to the point where I'm like, man, screw it. Like, should we only just do that? Right. Which is maybe that could work. And certainly that would be a lot easier to run that operation. So I think news aggregators work. I think that they can be a really good business if you keep them lean, like 3, 4, 5 people. But particularly, I've always said this, Sean, that the conservatives engage with news way more. I don't know what the right word is. Fervently. Fervently. Yeah. It's— they have a more rabid fan base because usually the right wings, the right-wing folks feel like they're the minority and that they're being pushed down. And so they like need a band, you know, any group that feels like they're the second, they feel like they got to band together and rise up, whatever. And so the conservatives always engage with news more. So I do think that there is something here. I have a friend that actually launched something like this who, you know, Sean, it's our good friend who lives near you.
Yeah.
And it worked really well. He ended up shutting it down because he didn't agree with that ideology. And so he was like, conscience got the best of him. This will make money, but this is not— I just can't do this. By the way, I'm not placing judgment. If you believe this shit, cool, that's fine. Do it. I think there's a way to make money. But he personally was like, this goes— actually goes against what I believe. I'm actually shutting it down. And, um, it worked out well for the short amount of time, at least. Like, the path was there that's like, oh man, this could totally work.
Yeah. And so I was looking at a couple of these alternatives because Trump tweeted out something a while back like, our people have left Drudge, it's become a lefty thing, and our people now go to Revolver. And so I was like, what the hell is Revolver? And so it's Revolver.News is one of these. Citizen Free Press is another where like, if you go to Citizen Free Press, it's just a white page with black links on it, citizenfreepress.com. And it's like, you know, here's some of the links. Something shady in Syracuse, dot, dot, dot. 42 shot, 11 dead in Chicago. Stephen Miller shoots and scores. CNN cancels Christmas. There's just like a whole bunch of these like kind of sensationalist links, which is like no different than pretty much any news, honestly. Like they're all sensationalist clickbait. Some are just more blatant about it than others. Some don't put up the facade of being noble journalism. Like you have Daily Mail who's like, yo, we're going to post about Kim Kardashian's butt every time she wears a bikini. And then you have CNN or somebody else who's going to like still be trying to drive as many clicks as possible, but they're going to not be as blatant about it.
Do you want to know one of these sites that I used to read all the time and I love it and like I found out that some of Sarah's girlfriends read it and we always make fun of it because it's so funny. Which one? It's called Media Takeout. Have you ever heard of Media Takeout? I love Media Takeout. It's mtonews.com. I think it is so funny.
So Media Takeout's kind of like a WorldStarHipHop, uh, TMZ-ish type site, but what's its like, what's its shtick?
So they talk about thicc Ana, which means, uh, when Rihanna was thick, when she was— or I don't know if she is or not, I don't know anything about it. I, I know enough to know that like in our family thread they're like talking about thicc Ana, and it just has the funniest headlines I've ever seen. Today is so freaking funny. And so we always talk about Media Takeout. It is so good.
Yeah, I think some of these sites are great. There were some other ones that were like this that were— what was the site that does the like, this person's cheating on this person, is this person having an affair with this person? That's like all it does. Or they were doing some really bad stuff that was like, on this college campus, you know, this guy or girl is sleeping around. Like, they were just like, oh, that was like the article on the website. It was like really crazy.
And it's like supposed to be really trashy. And you know what I just realized while I'm on Media Takeout? This is Hilarious media takeout. So it's mtonews.com, right? Yep. Okay. It's supposed to be trashy. Like, that's why it's funny. It's like, it's funny because it's trashy. So they were independent. I noticed a shift in their content. They've switched to where now it's owned by this company called Maven. Do you know what Maven does?
No, I just clicked the link at the bottom because I was curious about the same. Who owns this?
They own Sports Illustrated and a bunch of other, like, incredibly legitimate things. And their CEO is Ross Levinson, who I've met before, who's the former CEO of the L.A. Times. And the former CEO of a bunch of like legitimate things. It's crazy. This is crazy that this company owns Media Takeout, right?
And by the way, isn't Sports Illustrated like bankrupt and for sale or something right now?
So by the way, the CEO of Media Takeout, in one sentence, what do you do? I provide gossip to the masses. Just straight up. Just says it. I love it. The second one, why did you create this? There was an opportunity in the media market to address African-American and urban audience. I decided to fill it. Media Takeout is among the top 500 most visited sites in the country. It was that. Is that— is it still the case? Yes, but everything's, you know, changing pretty frequently. That's pretty crazy. So it had 16 million readers a month at one point, and then it's a lot more now. He says 30 million visitors a day.
It's crazy. It's really big.
You're in the wrong niche, bro.
So here's my— here's my opinion. By the way, the person who I just looked— I'm like, I'm on the team page. Do you know a woman named Sarah Stringfellow? She's a VP publisher at the company. She was the first employee at Twitch.
Oh really?
Yeah, she was the first hired Justin.tv, which went on to become Twitch. So these websites, these gossip websites, as long as they are so ridiculous that they're funny, what you have to do is you got to cross the barrier to where you are talking about it like you and I are to our friends or with Sarah and our family. So for example, WorldStarHipHop or WorldStar, they crossed the chasm of the threshold by people screaming WorldStar. And like, what's part of that became part of culture. Same with Fashion Nova. So like Fashion Nova is like the shitty, you know, I mean, there's like pretty fucking shitty clothes. And once it crossed the threshold of like, oh, it's just another Fashion Nova ad. Like once you start saying with that, your friends, it became a thing. Same with Media Takeout. When me and my friends or my family would start talking about Media Takeout, it became a thing to me so that I consume it all the time. I love Media Takeout. So like these sites, you got to figure out you can't just be behind the scenes entirely. You have to do something. You could have this. But you have to do something interesting or impactful to cross the threshold. Same with Drudge. What Drudge did was they actually did the Clinton thing, so they had one or two legitimate stories that they broke that made them right. Not legitimate, but part of culture. And that's what you have to do with these.
Yeah, I would agree. TMZ has done an amazing job of that, I would say. Agreed. The big risk with these things is that you can get Gawker'd basically, where Gawker was this, and then Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan basically sued, sued them to the point where, you know, they basically sued them out of business. And so in one day, basically the business shuttered overnight.
Yeah, but the problem was that Gawker wouldn't acknowledge what they were, which is just trash, right? And this media takeout, they say, they say we are trash and it is awesome trash.
I think that wasn't the problem. I think Gawker literally just picked on the wrong guy. Uh, they picked on Peter Thiel and Peter Thiel was just the wrong person to mess with. A deep-pocketed billionaire with a vengeance streak is not, not the one to mess with, right? They messed with 1,000 famous people and got no repercussions.
It started that way because someone said, take down the video. And they go, no, we're journalists. Fuck that. We're going to have this sex tape on our video because on our website, because we're journalists and there's no such thing as holding us back. Whereas like Media Takeout would be like, all right, okay. Like they don't have like, you know, it's a different shtick. They don't have like a principle probably that they're trying to.
So if you wanted to do a business like this, where would you, where would you look? Where would you start? First of all, you probably— I'm guessing you probably wouldn't want to do a business like this. Am I right on that or no?
100%. But it would be fun. I would say that I would probably start with Reddit.com public freakout. Do you know public freakout?
I haven't. No, I haven't gone to it.
So it's a subreddit where I notice a lot of people like Barstool and other folks get their posts from. And it's just a— it's got a million subscribers maybe, and it just has lots of videos of people freaking out. Right. There's this other website called— there's two more that I would do. There's this other one called Karma or no, what's it called? Justice Served. And I noticed that the engagement on that subreddit is like stupidly high. There's two more that are combined. They're called Popping and the other one's called Felt Good Coming Out. And it's all of like these like instant relief. For example, there's like a video of like a horse getting like a piece of hair pulled out of its stomach. And when you pull it out, then like this whole abscess like leaks out. People are obsessed with that. So I'd probably start in those three areas.
Interesting. Okay. I, if I was going to do this, I don't think I'm the best person to do this, so my idea is probably bad, but I would definitely go for gossip. So I'd either go for like a Hollywood gossip or like kind of the Instagrammer, TikToker, like not Hollywood gossip, like kind of social media famous but not Hollywood famous. And I would go for their gossip. I would do it all through SMS and I would just text out anytime anything happens. Anytime this person cheated on that person, this person said something, this person commented on this person's photo. This person liked this person's photo that they're not supposed to. I would just be texting that out for all these like famous people that you, that this young audience is into. So I would try to be kind of TMZ for two rungs down the ladder of social media stars. That'd be one. And then the other would just be kind of WorldStar style, like ridiculous videos that aren't going to be posted on YouTube because they're too extreme or they're too crazy. And I would do that. Or the last one would be conspiracies. I think that you could, you could build a site like this just on conspiracy and rumor. And again, I would try to do the whole thing through SMS. I think that would be the way I would build it.
I think that your TikTok one is the best idea, but it could be tied with the conspiracy one. So I'm a follower of a whole lot of the conspiracy ones. So I love True Crime, I love Unsolved Mysteries. These are all subreddits. Last night I just watched a 50-minute documentary to fall asleep about Robert Hansen, the serial killer in Alaska who would kidnap women and throw them in the wild and then hunt them like I like. I'm obsessed with—
great thing to go to sleep to.
Love it. Serial killers, conspiracy theories. I love conspiracy theories. I just bought a book on JFK's conspiracy or the conspiracy of him being murdered. So I agree with you. The engagement on some of these subreddits is crazy. Like people dedicate their lives to uncovering conspiracies as well as finding missing people. They invest so heavily into it because you like, eventually they feel like they know the person. So anyway, I agree with you. I think those would be some really good niches.
I like it.
Oh, so let's wrap this up by saying we talked about opportunities. So opinion. So here's what I think about Drudge. Who cares about his politics? What I think happened is he just did the coolest thing ever, which is he got rich on the internet and he bounced.
You think he sold it or he, or he just stopped working on it?
One of the two. But I think that he made probably $150 million and he goes, all right, I'm out. And he bailed. And I think that bailing like that is so cool. And you remember this other guy who did this? Do you remember Flappy Bird?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's his name?
What was the maker's name? Yeah, Dong Nguyen. Yeah, that's right.
So Dong Nguyen, he, uh, created this game called Flappy Bird and it got downloaded 50 million times in like a 2-month period, by the way.
It was like a very short amount of time. Every, every, everybody already know. We don't even need to explain Flappy Bird because you downloaded Flappy Bird.
In the article, they said Druge had talked about one day I'm just gonna— the page is gonna load, it's gonna be all black, and it's gonna be over. That's how I'm gonna do it. And so he didn't do it that way. I don't think he bounced because I think he would have done it in a flashier way, just by like anything I've ever read about this guy. I think he would have either sold it publicly or he would have done something like what you're talking about, which is like go extreme and like just shut the site off. I don't think he would let it slip into like irrelevance and like kind of lefty style stuff. I just feel like that would be not the cool way to like let it go.
When I— one time I— when I first moved to San Francisco, I volunteered to help Andrew Warner and we went to the Launch Fest and he was interviewing people and I was like filming or something. And he interviewed this guy. I was trying to find out who it is, who has a software company that now does about $100 million in sales. And the guy told a story. He goes, I created this service in college and it was a cloud hosting site. And the more popular it get, the more money it cost me. And I was giving it to people for like free. And eventually I was like, ugh, I can't afford this anymore. So he emailed the customers and goes, I'm shutting this off in the next 48 hours unless I collect this much money. So if you want the service, you have to become a customer. And he like made the money and then he is like, oh wow. All right, fine, I'll keep doing it and we're going to charge money for it. Like, he was like a, like a, like a nerd who just— anyway, have you heard any other stories of people saying, I have this thing, I'm bailing unless of course, like, I can make enough money to make this a thing, then fine. But until then, like, I'm out.
All right. So this ties in. Did you see the Dave Chappelle thing that happened recently? Did we talk about this already?
Told Netflix to take his shit off. Did you see what he posted on Instagram? No. All right. You got to watch this video. Maybe I'm just like too into this, but like I sent this to 5 people with just like, wow, wow, this is amazing. And none of them like replied like, yeah, that was amazing. So maybe I'm off, but I thought this was fucking awesome. So Chappelle's Show, which has a cult following, goes on Netflix. A bunch of people are like, yes, Chappelle's Show is on Netflix. I get to watch all of it. And then like, I don't know, a few weeks later it goes down. Why did it go down? Dave Chappelle asked for it to go down. Why is that? So he posted on Instagram a video, a 20-minute IGTV video that says, this is why. And then he explains, it's like him at a comedy club and he's explaining why he did what he did. And he weaves together a story like, you know, Dave Chappelle is kind of like, you know, a comedian, normal dude, like loves to smoke weed or whatever. But to me, this was like every PR person, every comms person at every big company needs to watch this and be like, oh, that's what perfection looks like for like communicating.
A message and getting people on your side looks like, which he's like the best at that. He tells stories. Yeah, he's the best at that.
He tells a story. I'm going to butcher it, but I'm going to give you the short version of it. So he's like, I remember the first time I ever did comedy. I was 14, 15 years old. I was at this comedy club and the guy who's introducing me goes, ladies and gentlemen, this is the first ever performance by this next comedian. Who knows? We may be seeing the birth of a star. I'd like to welcome on stage Stage, David Chappelle. He's like, he goes on stage, he does his set. And afterwards, this other guy's like, this older comedian who's like, you know, probably 40 goes up to him. He's a 15-year-old kid. And he's like, hey, that joke you told about Goodyear condoms. I really liked that joke. I have an audition next week at this club across the street. Would you mind if I use that joke? And Dave was just like, oh, like, you know, kind of weird, but like, okay, it's fine. I guess if it helps you get the audition, that's cool. And so he says, yeah. And then he's just like, whatever. And then 3 months later, 4 months later, he's at a club and that guy's going before him. And that guy does his joke and he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, dude. Like, this is, it's been 4 months. You said you needed it for the audition. Like, you can't just take my material. I was going on right after you. I was going to say that joke. And the guy's like, all right, let me buy this joke off you for $50. And Dave's like, again, 15 years old. He's like, I don't know. Like, I don't have any money, but like, that seems like not the right move for me. I think I should, keep my material and build my name off of my content. And the guy's like, well, you know, I was just being nice. I could just take it. You know that, right? I could just take it. And he kind of towered over him as an adult man. And Dave's like, all right, I guess it's fine. And then he's like, all right, let's jump forward 3 years now. And he tells a second story. And basically he weaves together these 3 life stories. Each one of them is like a funny, interesting story on its own. And he weaves it together to show like how he's basically over his career just kind of like constantly been taken advantage of by sort of the bigger players. Like at first it was this 40-year-old man at the club and then like most recently it was like, you know, the network execs who own Chappelle's Show. And he's like, I walked away because I didn't want to do the show on the terms that they were telling me to do it. And then they say I go, I've gone crazy, I'm smoking crack, I'm in Africa. He's like, I never smoked crack. He's like, I just didn't want to do the show. And he's like, and now I can't even do a new show because they signed, you know, I had to sign a contract that said you can use my name and likeness forever and in perpetuity in all parts of the universe. And he's like, well, he's like, what kind of contract language is that? That's like all parts of the universe. Was that even really necessary? So I literally can't come out with another show with my name in it because these fuckers own it. He's like, so I called Netflix and I was like, hey, I don't have any legal power here, but like this shit makes me feel bad. Because I'm not making a dollar off this and they're making a lot of money off my name, off my content, and I can't even make a new show because of this. And Netflix took it down. He's like, that's why I fuck with Netflix.
So I just thought it was great. So everyone should go watch that thing. I think it was like a master— it was interesting and it's like a masterclass in like telling your side of the story.
I wonder if that's good for Netflix. It certainly makes me appreciate them. You know what it does, though, more than anything, is every creator will be like, All right, fine, Netflix, we'll work with you. You sound cool.
Because who is Netflix in competition with? They're not in competition with Hulu. They're in competition really with all of the production studios, right? Because they're doing original content, they're trying to sign talent, sign actors, producers, all that stuff. So what weak competition really is like the traditional Hollywood world, because they got away with the monopoly for so long that things were so screwed up that all you have to do is just not be completely an asshole and you look like a knight in shining armor. And so I think this is going to be good for them with creators. I agree, especially comedians, because they're going heavy into comedy and like every comedian looks up to Dave Chappelle.
I want to talk about a— right, this writing tool. But before I do, since we're talking about Hollywood, I just looked up— I like looking at houses for sale. There's a house for sale in LA for $85 million and it's Ryan Seacrest's house. How the fuck did Ryan Seacrest get so rich that he has a house worth almost $100 million?
Hardest working man in Hollywood, dude.
Oh my God. And then I looked up what he does. It's called like Ryan Seacrest Media, and they raised like $300 million, which is outstanding. Crazy. And then they explained what they did and like they write television shows and they produce television shows. And the way— like, I just know so little about that industry. I'm like, what the fuck do you do?
Yeah, I also don't really know. I know he has like his morning radio show type thing.
He does everything now. He hosts like— it's like Ryan and Kelly instead of, you know, it was Michael. It was Regis and Kelly, then Michael.
No, if you remember when American Idol started, there was two guys that were the hosts. Yeah, it was Ryan Seacrest and fucking other guy, and the other guy wanted like a little more money and they were like, nah, fuck you, we don't need you. So Ryan Seacrest like stayed on and became like the household name, and this guy who was like holding the winning lottery ticket unfortunately, like, got it pulled out of his hand after, after the first season.
I just looked up Bryan Seacrest Productions. I'm like, it's really hard for me to understand what you do, but he raised $300 million from PE companies. So like legit companies. And I'm like, what the heck? So one of these days we're going to dive in because there's a whole bunch of these companies. So there's like Tyler Perry Productions as well, but they're like around one person. There was Dick Clark Productions and I'm like, what does that mean? First of all, what does a production company do exactly? Because it sounds like a very manual thing to produce a show, and I understand how that creates massive returns. Second, why is it after one person? So we got to dive deep on that, actually. I think that's a— that'd be interesting topic.
Okay, I have a 5-minute tangent— a 2-minute tangent, I should say. Do you remember Celebrity Deathmatch on MTV?
Obviously.
So I went down this rabbit hole last night about Celebrity Deathmatch because I was like, what happened to that? Was that as awesome as I remembered? I went back and watched one. I was like, yeah, this is awesome. And then I was like, how did they make this? Because it was like claymation or whatever. I was like, how hard would this be to do? And so I watched the making of, of a Celebrity Deathmatch. Amazing YouTube video to go watch.
It's really hard, I think, right? Don't they literally—
so they make like a— the, the doll is basically like this wire. So imagine like kind of like a, like a hanger material, like just wires., and that's in the stick figure of, like, a body. They have an artist who draws, like, a 3D version, a caricature of, like, whichever celebrities are in the match, like Bill Clinton. They'll find, like, what's the one unique identifying, like, physical trait of this person? Is it their big chin? Is it their hair? And they, like, accentuate that, like any caricature. They do a 3D drawing, and then a guy makes it out of clay, and they put it on rubber so it's not so heavy. And so that's, like, the mold. The whole thing is animated, right? So how do they animate this? So there's, like, this tiny little, like, desk-sized green screen stage, and then literally there's a camera that's just set. This is back, like, in the '90s, so, like, I can't even imagine how much easier this would be now. And actually, I tweeted at the creator. He's on Twitter. He's got, like, 300 followers or something. I was like, dude, how much easier would this be now? 100 times easier to do? Because, like, good on you guys for doing this ridiculously over-the-top thing that, like, was completely unnecessary and just pushing the boundaries.
And what'd he say?
So he didn't reply yet, but he probably doesn't even use Twitter anymore. He's, like, kind of, like, completely off the grid, but We'll see if he replies. I tweeted at him like 3 AM last night when I was looking at this, but they make 15 different mouths for the characters. And so as they're animating them talking, it's like photo, then switch off mouth, put next mouth, photo, next mouth, photo. And they have 15 mouths that can make the like kind of syllable expressions of all words. And they just animate like if he's like jumping off the top rope, that's like they move them 1 inch, take the photo, move them 1 inch. It's like a hand animated thing. It's ridiculous. Like so crazy of a thing.
Yeah, I remember that shit. That was Very hard to do.
It got me thinking. I was like, I feel like that was a great concept that was way before its time, both in terms of the technology to do it. Like, I think now you could probably do this whole thing essentially with AI. I think you can animate the whole thing using the kind of modern graphic stuff. And then the second thing is distribution. So that was a television show, but I bet you if you made a TikTok account that was like the poor man's version of Celebrity Deathmatch, you'd probably get 5 million followers in like 3 weeks., and you could make, I don't know, probably $1 million a year just sponsored off sponsored stuff of your TikTok channel. That's going to be because you're going to be way better production than any TikTok account, and it's completely permissionless. So any kind of artsy-craftsy film kid somewhere who doesn't want to like go through the gauntlet of Hollywood, the TikTok gates are open. Just go make Celebrity Deathmatch TikTok edition. Do it between TikTokers. They'll retweet it or react to it. And I bet you'll get to like millions of followers, you know, if you did it well.
That's a great idea. I was gonna ask you to talk about writing tools that I have on here. Let's, we have to get to that next week because we're already on this topic. You might as well, this is like a Hollywood episode, get to the Jake Paul stuff.
Yeah, and unfortunately I don't know anything about Hollywood, so I'm just, you know, talking out my ass with a lot of this stuff. So you, did you watch this boxing match that happened with Jake Paul over the weekend?
Hell yeah.
So for those who don't know, Jake Paul, this kind of like big Viner turned YouTuber, turned like whatever, kind of like teen influencer guy. They made a career pivot where they stopped vlogging, Jake and his brother Logan, and they started hosting these celebrity boxing tournaments where boxing matches where it was like two YouTubers, KSI fought Logan Paul and Jake Paul fought KSI's little brother. And you either know all about this or you know nothing about this. So I'm trying to figure out how much to explain, how much not to explain.
I know all about it, by the way.
So what's interesting is I think this is a, a brilliant move. And B, like an amazing business model to capitalize on the fame. So what they did was Jake Paul fought Nate Robinson, who's an ex-basketball player. He's the Slam Dunk champion. He's like this 5'9" super athlete dunker who's out of the league now. So they agreed to fight on the undercard of the Mike Tyson, who's like 53 years old, Mike Tyson versus Roy Jones Jr. So they were the co-main event against these 50-year-olds boxing. I bet you Jake Paul drove, I don't know, 30 to 40% of the buys compared to, uh, to Tyson, maybe 30%. And I just think this amazing model. I would not be surprised if these guys are banking $10 million, $5 million every time they do one of these events. And they've done like one or two a year now for the last couple years. I think this is way better than doing, you know, Sugar Bear Hair ads, uh, you know, on your Instagram or whatever. It's a way better business model for these influencers. Now it takes a lot of like risk and effort, but I think it elevates them to like a different stratosphere of fame and fortune.
So, Abreu, while we're talking, can you find out how many viewers that fight had? See if there's anything like that. So basically the background here— I wasn't allowed to talk about this, but I think I— I don't know if I talked to you about it or not, Sean, but in March or May or something like that, I actually— the creators, the promoters of this event emailed me asking if we wanted to sponsor. I didn't want to sponsor, but I wanted to see the deck because I'm a huge boxing and fight fan. And they sent me all the information. So I knew about Tyson fighting before he announced it. And I was so amped and I didn't tell, I don't think I talked to anyone about it actually. And the idea here is that Triller, what is Triller? Triller is an app. I think it has 100 million users. It's like a music video app.
It's TikTok, but it's based in the US. So Triller has been around for a while. Triller and Musical.ly were competing. Musical.ly got bought by the Chinese company ByteDance and it became TikTok, and TikTok took over the world. But Triller is still a fledgling. They're trying to make it. They announced some big numbers. I don't personally believe it, but they are basically trying to be TikTok. And they're in some ways, you know, the best outcome for them is TikTok gets banned because of sort of like people have talked about the TikTok ban because of the Chinese backing and the data collection privacy issues. And if so, Triller would be the big beneficiary because it's TikTok in, in the wings.
And they paid, according to Abreu, $50 million for the right to stream the fight. And, uh, they were trying to get a bunch of app downloads. I bet you it worked pretty well.
It wasn't— I don't think that's right because it wasn't even in— it wasn't even on Triller. The event was called TysonOnTriller.com, but you could watch the thing without Triller. There's no way they would pay $50 million for it to be non-exclusive. I don't believe that. You can just go buy the pay-per-view without go downloading Triller.
What did, what did he say?
So he's saying the estimate, the, you know, the estimate for by a veteran promoter, Lou D'Abilla, was that, it would be a million-plus pay-per-view buys, which is like almost Conor McGregor, Floyd Mayweather territory of like how much they can individually draw. Like the biggest pay-per-view of all time was the, uh, Manny Pacquiao, Floyd Mayweather, which was like close to— it was between 4 and 6, 4 million domestic buys. So that's 4 million people buying something at essentially $70 apiece. So that's a lot of revenue. It's like, what is that? I don't know, $600 million in revenue or something like that. And so this would be a million. A million would be more than pretty much every UFC pay-per-view card of the year except for Conor McGregor one.
So two things happened. I agree with you. It's a better way to make money if you're a YouTuber. But then also there used to be this show in the '90s where retired athletes like retired football players would do like a track and field, like a decathlon or something. And it's kind of cool. I watched old videos of it because like there's all amongst runners, which I'm in the running community, there's always bets like, do you think that Usain Bolt could have ran a half mile in under 2 minutes? Or do you think Mayweather says he's fast? There's no way he could break 5 minutes in the mile, though. He would always act like he would. Like, could he actually do it? And so Tyson was like, after the fight, Tyson was like, man, I think a lot of people like seeing us old guys fight. They know we're not the best, but I think more people watch— watch— will want to watch Randy Moss do something than the guy who currently plays the position.
Right.
And I was like, I agree with you, actually.
I think that, well, the numbers will back it up. This event is going to draw more than— I could be wrong, but I believe more than any boxing event of the year.
Oh yeah, even more than Deontay Wilder and Fury, although I don't remember what year that was, if that was this year.
Oh bro, you looked that up, but maybe, maybe I'm wrong on that. Did Wilder Fury do, let's say, 2 million pay-per-views?
Half a million. I already looked it up.
Half a million, exactly. So this is gonna beat that.
Well, the only other boxing match that would be bigger than this is the other Logan Paul one, right?
Well, that one, what was interesting is that one was a YouTube pay-per-view of like $5 or $10. This one was a full $60 pay-per-view because it had Tyson on it. And so it was— this one, even if this had a fraction of the people watching it, this was much, much bigger.
I watched both of them. I paid for one of them. I bootlegged this one.
Yeah, I bootlegged. I would never pay for this, but so easy to bootleg nowadays.
Where do you— what do you go to?
Two ways. There's a website called ripple.is, so ripple.is. They have bootlegged all sports. And then the other one is there's a Discord channel. If you just Google MMA Cracked Streams Discord, MMA Cracked Streams Discord, that's a Discord, and they always post the link in the main channel there in Discord about where you can find this thing.
So I go to this website called crackedstreams.com, and I looked up the traffic of it. Cracked Streams, it gets like 50 million monthly uniques.
Super spiky, I'm sure.
It is crazy. It is crazy, crazy, crazy. They always do these things where you click this ad and you gotta register. I have no idea how that makes money.
I would love to have one of these guys who's— who owns one of these sites come on and just talk about it, because yeah, I mean, it's, it's clearly just like shit ton of ads. And they know, like, hey, you're, you're doing the pirating thing, so you're gonna put up with like the maximum possible number of ads. And, uh, you know, they, they really do screw your computer up, but it's all good.
It's worth it. So here I posted the one that I go to. I looked them up on SimilarWeb. According to SimilarWeb, they're at 30 million uniques, 26 million uniques last month with the average visit duration of 2 hours. Right. It's nuts. It's nuts. It's nuts. It's nuts. I want to, I definitely want to know who and all 62% of the traffic is direct and 33% from search. So it's just like the best audience ever. I want to know how, uh, well, it's illegal, right?
So that's the problem is, is you're running an illegal business. So it's like. If you want to do pirated content, you're going to get a lot of traffic. If you're going to give away pirated stuff for free, if you, uh, like, it's really funny. I was on the, the Twitter channel of Chad Hurley, the creator of YouTube. And there was this chart that came out that showed the growth during COVID of all these different platforms like YouTube and Twitch and TikTok. And then OnlyFans, OnlyFans is like spiked up way above everybody else. And he just retweeted it and just, just wrote, Titties. I just thought, like, an amazing, amazing retweet by the founder of YouTube. Yeah, if you do porn, you do illegal content, you do gambling, you will get the traffic, no doubt. You know, your business might be in murky waters, but good luck.
I just looked up this guy Chad Hurley. His latest tweet was, if I was employed, I could easily be fired for what's in my Twitter drafts, right? Um, I'm looking at this graph. How big do you think OnlyFans is now?
Well, I kind of know, so I can't really say because that would be giving it away.
According to this, their revenue is significantly greater than Twitch. Do you believe that to be true?
Uh, I can't say. I have info on both sides, so, so that would be— I'd get in trouble if I said anything.
Okay, so this is all from the tweet. OnlyFans lets creators charge for access to content. In 4 years, OnlyFans grew to 1 million creators, $2 billion paid to creators, and 100 creators making at least $1 million. What? That's crazy. So this is like a multibillion-dollar company already.
It is definitely a multibillion-dollar company.
What? That is crazy. Crazy, crazy, crazy. All right, that's nuts. I can't believe that. But I mean, I can believe it, but good on them. Does the guy who started still work there, or did he hand the reins away to someone else?
I think they're still there. Wow. Wow, wow, wow.
That's amazing. What a crazy company.
All right, the Hollywood episode is over. What do we talk about? Jake Paul. Talked about Drudge. We talked about Celebrity Deathmatch and OnlyFans. All right.
All right. Talk to you later. All right, man. Peace.
See ya.