I was thinking and praying about the whole comments issue (see my previous post) and was gently reminded by the Holy Spirit that I’m not doing this whole videos for churches thing for Gary (or the commenting public in general), I’m doing it for God. And as long as I can keep that perspective then the things that people have to say about our videos don’t hurt so bad. Of course, I also have to remember to lean on and trust God in everything so that I don’t go from being hurt by the comments to worrying about how they’re going to effect our sales and thus our ability to keep the lights on, not just at eleven72 World Headquarters but at our homes as well. So, today at least, say what you will, I’m serving and trusting God :).

Thought you all might like to take a look around. You know, see where all the magic happens.

(Above) Lee kickin’ it in Edit Suite #1, as in we have one Edit Suite
(Above) My workspace, etc. Featuring a drafting desk my dad made for my
sister in 1983. I rescued The Virgin from the dumpster outside our office.

(Above) Check out the killer big screen where we watch movies
on Monday mornings.

(Above) What’s in the fridge? Nothing good, that’s for sure.

I haven’t been blogging very regularly for a number of reasons. A big one is that we were having a lot of trouble integrating the blog into our new website. I’m still not 100% happy with how the blog looks on the site, but we’ll figure it out. I am, however, really happy with the new site (www.eleven72.com). I love the new design. More than that, I love that we finally have a solid shopping cart and customers are able to reliably get their downloads. I’d love to hear any impressions from you guys on the site, what are your impressions, how does it function, what are your likes or dislikes? We’re getting ready to roll it out to our email list. We wanted to make sure it was working properly before we formally introducted it.

So I’m hoping to get back on the blogging train. Find some useful stuff to talk about. Etc.

Come follow me… on Twitter… where I Tweet or something… www.twitter.com/storme

What do you think of all the hubbub over this Huckabee ad? I actually don’t know much about Huckabee or what I think about him, but all this buzz definitely makes me want to figure out what I think. Thoughts?

Check out this funny response in an interview with Huckabee:

I was just thinking… You know because we get complaints about the prices of our videos and it twists me up inside to think that people think we’re somehow gouging them when really we’re trying our best to serve them… Did you realize that you could buy a $20 Sermon Illustration every week. That’s purchase and show a $20 video every week for a year and only spend $1040. Wow. I never thought about that before. That’s a video every week for less than it would cost to produce just one single video on your own. Good stuff.

Connect With Us

I’ve gone and got myself all into all these networking sites. I know. I know. I’m about a decade late to the party. But still, I’d love to be your friend :). Connect with us, check out our videos, learn more about us, etc, at:

Facebook (Storme)

Facebook (Lee)

Eleven72 on YouTube

Eleven72 on MySpace

Eleven72 on GodTube (not much here from us… yet)

Eleven72 on LinkedIn

Most fans paid $0 for Radiohead Album. This according to an AP Business article I came across at Brietbart.com. Google radiohead rainbows and you’ll get hits on other articles about the same. The stats say that a little over 60% of the folks who downloaded the album opted to pay nothing, while about 38% of the folks paid an average of $6 each. So , a majority, when given the choice, chose not to pay anything, even though what Radiohead was doing was so great, so cool, so revolutionary. But with all the worldwide publicity they got, and at $6 a person for the remaining 38%, and with the site getting 1.2 million visitors, I’m sure they’re glad they did it nonetheless.

I’ve been following all this Radiohead stuff, trying to figure out what to make of it. Just to catch you up on a few things you might not know about the whole affair.

• Radiohead, in a move that was considered revolutionary decided to bypass the record industry and release their album themselves, telling fans they could come and download the album from a special site and pay whatever they like, including nothing.
• The tracks up for download were not high quality audio files. They were low quality/low bitrate/whatever MP3s.
• In conjunction with the downloading stunt, Radiohead offered a collector’s edition release of the album with all kinds of extra goodies for something like $80.
• A couple of weeks after making the album available online, it came out that Radiohead would be selling a CD at Big Box retailers like Best Buy come 2008. And no, the CD, with the high quality sound files, would not be pay whatever you want. This angered some folks and they began to say that the whole download the album thing was just some kind of publicity stunt and it wasn’t entirely sincere and, with it on its way to the shelves of Best Buy, it was no longer revolutionary.

And now, here we are. 1.2 million people visited the download site. 38% of the people who downloaded the album paid $6 on average. 62% of the people opted to get it for free. What’s all this mean? I’m not sure. I’ve thought about all this in relation to the way that we sell videos. It would be cool to try something like this with our media library, for a short period of time, see what kind of results we got. See what people were/are willing to pay. But we wouldn’t get the press that Radiohead got to drive traffic to our site, we don’t have nearly nearly as many fans or potential customers, etc, etc.It’s not apples to apples when you compare us to them. But it does cause you to think. And so it goes.