Comedian Louis C.K.’s self-financed video grosses $550K in 4 days

Comedian Louis C.K. is laughing all the way to the bank. His self-distributed, standup special made more than $550,000 in just four days.

C.K. made Live at the Beacon Theater available on his website for $5 on Saturday and by Tuesday, he wrote, “we have sold over 110,000 copies.”

“Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58),” he wrote, joking about the tax portion.

He financed the entire project himself and asked his fans not to “steal” his work.

“At this point I think we can safely say that the experiment really worked. If anybody stole it, it wasn’t many of you,” he wrote.

In a move that will be familiar to fans of his almost completely independent show Louie, C.K. directed the special himself. The six-camera performance cost $170,000 to produce and he spent a further $32,000 to develop the website.

Keeping Live at the Beacon Theater independent is important to the comedian. He wrote that he was paid less “than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video.

“They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely,” he explained on his website.

“This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.”