Tucker Carlson's Putin interview gets 179M views, and Why news sites are removing subscriptions

So today we're going to be talking about how Tucker Carlson interviewed Vladimir Putin.

Who?

Tucker Carlson. Yeah, okay, you start it out.

All right, all right, we're going to talk about Tucker Carlson first and foremost because he just did a crazy interview with Vladimir Putin, and Neil's got some hot takes.

Forget the interview, I'm not saying it's bad or good, but he streamed it on X. It had 179 million views in a matter of days.

And you said livestream?

Yes.

Okay.

He livestreamed it on X.

Yeah.

That's why—

I didn't know that.

Yeah. Or that's at least— I didn't watch it live.

Yeah.

But that's what it— or technically it wasn't live. He streamed it on X. He interviewed it beforehand in Russia. But at a specific time, I think it was like 3 PM or 4 PM Pacific Standard Time, he was like, we're going to release it. And he ended up releasing it on X. But just on X alone, it got 179 million views. And you didn't watch the X version. You watched the AI version.

No, I watched the YouTube version with a translation, but then I saw a clip of the AI version.

And the AI version had more emotions?

It's, um, so it basically took Putin's voice and then it lip-synced it. So the lips, like, you can tell it's kind of like a machine, like, you know, lips, but it has his emotions and it has his voice, so it flows a little better.

Oh, cool. I'm gonna check that one out.

Same thing with the Argentina president. Remember the World Economic Forum? Yeah, same deal.

And overall, you know, I don't know, have you watched the whole thing or you just watched—

Only 1 hour. I'm gonna go home and watch the rest after I get my food.

Yeah, it was definitely interesting. I know you and I, neither of us really care to get political, but—

Not on this podcast. Yes. You know, I got called out for that in the comments. But someone was like, Neil's the more level-headed one. Eric's talking about, you know, Trump's marketing and Elon's marketing. I'm like, dude, it's just talking about their marketing. It's not like I'm like saying anything good or bad about them. Yeah.

And what I saw from it is like, if you look at Tucker, He was a Fox News— what do they call him? Not—

he's like a number one anchor. Anchor.

Yeah, he was a news anchor man. Yeah, that's true. Like Ron Jeremy. Yeah, yeah. So he was an anchor man.

Ron Jeremy's the porn star.

Ron Jeremy?

Is it? Yeah.

What's the guy's name?

Ron what?

Ron Burgundy.

Ron Burgundy.

All right. So on a side note, didn't Ron Jeremy try to run for president or something like that?

I don't think so.

It was something like that. He made the news. Congressman, senator back in the day. Either way, so he's an anchorman and he got fired from Fox because I think there were some disagreements on what he was talking about versus some of the advertisers.

Yes.

And then on the flip side, when he ended up going out on his own, people offered him a lot of money to join up like the guy who created—

Valuetainment.

Yeah, Valuetainment.

$100 million contract and he put it on Twitter.

Yeah. And what he ended up doing is he decided to just go out on his own and he created his own network called the TCN or something like that.

Tucker Carlson Network. Yeah.

And he streamed this on his own website. I watched it on his website and not on X.

Wow. Why?

Because when I was watching on X, I kept getting media errors.

Interesting.

Like saying like, oh, media player error. And then—

Why don't you just go to YouTube? That's where I watched it.

Then I just went to his website.

Okay.

I didn't know if it was going to be on YouTube or not because it made it seem like it was only going to be on YouTube.

By the way, it grew really fast. When I started watching it, it was like 500,000 views. And then when I checked again a couple of hours later, it's like 4 hours later, it was like 9 million views.

Oh, wow. Yeah, but it streamed better on his website than X because I think too many people were trying to stream it and the quality was just so low. And I have good internet, so I was like, screw this. I went to What is it called? I went to his website, I saw it, and he also has paid plans. I don't subscribe to his paid plans or anything like that, but I said, I'm like, dude, this guy probably racked in millions of dollars.

In ads?

No, in revenue. He doesn't have ads. He has a subscription. Like, if you want—

Oh, revenue to watch the— Yeah, I wonder how he made money on that one.

No, it's free. But if you go to his own website, yeah, He has other interviews and he talks about stuff like the borders or whatever it may be. And he charges for a lot of his content. So how many people saw that interview and they're like, oh, we want all these other exclusive interviews and subscribe? I bet you he generated more than $1 million in revenue, way more than that.

I bet. He runs Google Ads for his own name.

I would too.

Yeah.

But I bet you he generated millions of dollars in revenue.

His offer's not bad on his site. So to your point, so if you go to tuckercarlson.com for $6 a month billed annually, you get Access to 5 brand new shows, speeches, films, and more investigative reports and short documentaries. Behind-the-scenes look, which I would want to see behind the scenes with Putin, right? Um, he's doing one with Snowden too that's going to be coming out, um, as well. And his personal inbox to ask him anything you want. So, uh, for $9 a month or $6 a month, that's pretty good. And I, I think a lot of people would pay for annual.

I don't know how he's gonna manage the inbox because my inbox is bad and he has a way bigger brand than I do.

No clue.

100x.

Has to be like a Reddit voting thing. Whatever gets the most questions gets answered. Who knows? We'll have to subscribe. You can subscribe. I'll use your account.

I don't want to spend $6.

But I think there's other implications here too, because, you know, Candace Owens, you know who she is?

Yes.

So she's got her own network too. And they're basically— a lot of people are leaving legacy news networks and they're building their own media companies. And Patrick Bet-David from Valuetainment has said this election cycle is going to be the last time that media has all the power. They think— he thinks that the power is shifting over to like new media, like podcasts, For example, I don't know if that's going to happen in the next 4 years, but I think we're seeing it slide in that direction.

Well, speaking of media, have you noticed that what a lot of the news sites end up publishing— and I think they're all responsible for it, it doesn't matter what way they lean politically— a lot of what they just put out isn't always the reality? I think what media does in many cases, in many countries, is they paint their own narrative.

They distort it.

Yeah.

Yes, you have to. I mean, just like this Putin interview, like, you have to control the narrative. I'm I was actually listening to this podcast where it talks about Napoleon, the guy that— the conqueror, right? And his whole thing is you have to control the message, you have to control the narrative, you have to overcommunicate. And like, he did get to the point where he was like censoring like the books that were released, right? Because he was controlling information flow. And then while I'm listening, I looked at the history of Nazi Germany, same thing too. It's like they control the narrative. That's how like they— it's the same thing for every single country. Like, we have our own propaganda too. So—

Yeah, but what's funny is if you look at the Putin interview, there's no way he was able to just Talk about whatever free. Like, for sure, you know, if I had to put money on it— I'm not a betting man, but if I was, I bet you Russia ended up controlling the interview and the narrative.

What was released to Russia? Like Russian citizens?

No, no, I'm talking about in the Tucker Carlson interview.

Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, you can tell he was trying to control it. Yeah, of course.

Yeah, he would just be like, just be patient, 30 seconds, and I just want to give you some context. I'm like, okay, this went on for 5, 10 minutes.

I kind of appreciated that he did. I mean, it was kind of annoying, But it's like it was important because nobody really knows the history from like his, his mouth. You know what I mean?

Yeah, no one knows it. But yes, you know, I think in marketing just in general, everyone is controlling the narrative whether we like it or not. And companies do the same thing too. A prime example of this is if a company has bad reviews, they want to control the narrative and show great reviews, right? We're all in essence guilty of it to some extent.

Yeah. So 179 million views on just X alone, probably tens of millions of views on other channels as well. And so I think he's just going to continue down this path. I think he'll probably get to the point where he interviews Xi Jinping as well. And I think it's helpful to listen to perspectives from everyone. And Lex Fridman wants to do the same thing. He wants to talk to Putin too. I think it's wrong for media to say, oh, Tucker Carlson's a mouthpiece for Russia. He shouldn't be talking. I think it's let everyone listen to the narrative from everyone. Let everyone make their own decision. And people don't like that.

Yeah, dude, I'm looking up right now his YouTube interview. I can't actually see the one that you're talking about with the millions of views.

The YouTube one?

I see 11 million views one day ago. Yeah, that's— this thing must have globally— because you have to remember, right, we are English speaking. There's so many other people that speak other languages like Spanish, Portuguese, French, etc. It must have been translated. I bet you this thing globally has over a billion views.

Whoever took the AI and translated into their native languages Like, this is just one of those— that's an arbitrage. If you want to like suck onto the, like, you know, like leech off the views, it'd be a parasite. Yeah. Get what I mean?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But getting views is great. If you can't convert them into customers, does it really matter at the end of the day?

It doesn't unless you're selling ads. And you're trying to arbitrage that. That's true.

But like, even you and I, right, we have ads on our podcast. If we have business advertisers on our podcast, and then we have Vladimir put an interview on our podcast, I get we're gonna get tons of impressions. So theory, we'll make more money from ad dollars. But the business advertisers are going to be disappointed because it's not going to convert well. It's just people are going to listen to the ad and not spend any money.

By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back to the show.

Dude, you know, by the time you guys listen to this, it'll be past the day, but tomorrow is the Super Bowl. Did you know that a company spends on average over $230,000 per second?

Isn't it? Isn't each commercial like $6 million now? $3 million? Okay, $6 million, $7 million now.

Yeah, but what most people don't tell you is you got to spend $7 million. And then they typically make you buy airtime for things like the Olympics or other events. And they want you to buy the same amount. So if you spend— because you have to remember, when you're watching the Super Bowl, there's prime spots for Super Bowl ads. And there's non-prime spots. If you want good spots, they typically want you to buy more ads for other backend stuff. I've seen in many cases, you had to buy like $18 million more on the back end.

Wow. So it becomes like a $25 million contract.

Plus the cost of creative. Yeah, a lot of people pay celebrities and they hire like the big companies.

Like $30 to $35 million.

You're typically looking at $25 to $35 million.

I wonder how Gary Vee got— remember when Gary Vee did the Crypto Bowl? Like he did like 2 or 3 commercials. I wonder—

The Crypto Bowl?

Yeah. So there's a— I think—

Wait, what's the Crypto Bowl?

No, this was like maybe 3 years ago or so, 2 years ago. Like FTX had a commercial, Coinbase had a commercial, a lot of People had like a lot of the exchanges had commercials.

Remember that Crypto Bowl? I thought you said Crypto Bowl, like a Super Bowl.

Yeah, yeah, they called the Crypto Bowl for that one. They kind of named it that because they knew a lot of exchanges were going to be advertising, right? And so I'm curious, like, you know, if— how much do you think these people are getting paid per creative? Like a million bucks, $5 million or so? Because I knew Gary Vee did a couple, like one was with JLo, one was— he had a couple celebs and all that.

Are you talking about the cost including the celebs or not including the celebs?

With and without? With and without.

So the cost for film crew and all that kind of stuff, you're looking at somewhere between, call it, $1 to $2 million. The rest of the money, like if you're spending $7, $8 million, the rest of the money is spent on the celeb talent.

Yep.

Assuming you're getting big celebrities.

Dude, I think we can wrap this one up with what— because we talked about media so much. I have this tweet over here open from Austin Rief, one of the co-founders of Morning Brew. So he's the CEO now, but So you see in this tweet, TechCrunch is shuttering its subscription service TC+ as it pushes to reorient its coverage around investors amid layoffs. Washington Post has lost roughly 500,000 subscribers since its Trump-era peak, is considering more dynamically priced subscriptions. Time fully removed its digital paywall. Quartz dropped its paywall. The Atlantic shifted from a blanket paywall to more dynamic, more dynamic approach. And then Gannett, which one of the, which is the US largest local newspaper company, began reducing the number of articles behind its paywall. So, this guy's tweet, the original tweeter, news sites pull back from subscription model is eye-watering. And then Austin said this, he said, the problem in media isn't the business model, the problem is that most of the content sucks. Now, when you look at Tucker Carlson's content, it's like, that's good content. That's why it works.

Yes, and I now understand why he didn't want to take a $100 million deal because he probably made more than— because it's only what, $20 million a year or something like that? He'll make more than $20 million in revenue just from—

And he was comfortable. It takes a lot of guts to be fired and say, be offered like $100,000 here, but like to know that in the long term, betting on yourself, you know, you're like, you already know you're a monster. Yeah. You know, you're worth a lot more.

Yes.

Yeah. So I find that interesting. So anyway, that is for— that's it for today's episode. Please don't forget to rate, rate, and subscribe. And oh, also go to marketingschool.io/agency because we have the application now open for our agency owners program. Agency Owners Association, and we'll see you tomorrow.