Sam Parr and Sean explore a subscription platform for mid-tier comedians, modeled on Crunchyroll's anime service. Netflix pays top comedians $10-20 million per special, but there's room for a $5-7 monthly service offering 10-20 minute sets from comedians just below that tier. Quello, a concert streaming app, had 70k subscribers at $10/month before its acquisition.
So I don't think this would work, so let me start with that. But there's something interesting here where— so Netflix recently, you know, Netflix in the last few years started going heavy into comedy. So comedy used to be like HBO kind of owned the space, uh, where they would do, you know, HBO specials. And then that kind of dried up, and comics are like cockroaches. They'll always survive. It's like, okay, we'll go play in the dingiest room. We'll go on stage. We'll get a Netflix special. We'll get an HBO special. Okay, we're back to the dark room again. Like, they won't quit because they're like degenerates. And now podcasting has been a huge boom for them. So Chris D'Elia, who also just had a Netflix special come out, these guys make tons of money, right? So Netflix started cutting like $10-20 million checks, I believe, to these comedians because they know that comedians have these like rabid followings and, uh, the content is good. It's unique, sort of proprietary content. But I think that there's a product out there sort of like a Crunchy— what Crunchyroll did for anime, I think somebody could do for the mid-tier comedians. I think you could make a sort of $5 a month, $7 a month subscription to, uh, the, the comedians that are not going to get Netflix specials, right? So not Chris Rock and not Seinfeld and Chappelle and, and all those guys, but like the next tier down, like, uh, even, you know, one level below like the Whitney Cummings of the world, right? Because they're still getting Netflix specials. And I think you could add them up, and it doesn't even have to be the hour-long special. It could be like a 10-minute set or a 20-minute set or something like that. And I think you could get— I think each of them have a few thousand fans that would pay to be able to access that exclusive comedy content. And, um, and so you would add— if you just aggregate all the comedians, then it's a sort of all-you-can-eat pass where, uh, as a viewer I can discover other comedians too. So anyways, I think that there's a business potentially for a mid-level Netflix for comedians where you aggregate them. What do you think?
Great. I'm looking up information so I can— I, I'm— my brain's rolling and I'm gonna— let me, let me tell you what I think. So, uh, first of all, Quibi, I imagine, is trying to do something like that. So Quibi, um, Is that even fucking how you say it?
Yeah, that is.
It's pretty stupid. Uh, I mean, look, I think with Quibi, um, it actually can be great because the people who are running it are like super smart, but it, it does not look like a good bet now, but it still might be. Um, anyway, they're trying to do something like that. Second, I think that that is a great idea, and I think the way that I would find out how to do it is I would look up Quello. Q-E-L-L-O. Have you heard of Quello?
Never heard of it.
Okay. Quello's cool. So what Quello is, is it's a, it's, I think it was started way before its time. It's an app on Apple TV and all they have is live concerts. And so it was started in 2010 and it's available on, it's like an, it's an app for your phone, but I think it's best on Apple TV and you could download it and you pay 10,000 or is it maybe $10 a month?
Sometimes $10,000 a month.
I think it's $10 a month and you just get access to a library of live concerts. Have you ever wanted to do that or is that just me?
I kind of do this on YouTube, but YouTube like has enough free— like I listen to a bunch of like Red Rocks concerts, right? Because there's a concert venue called Red Rocks, which is awesome. And like anytime a musician goes there, they film it in like epic— with epic cameras and sound and they're just like available on YouTube for free. But This is cool. I like this.
It's awesome. And it's better than YouTube, but YouTube is great. And the reason it's better is because like if you buy like a concert DVD, the camera works a little bit better and the sound is a lot better. And I love live music. And so I am a big fan of this. And they have 70,000 paying subscribers. They were recently acquired by Stingray Communications, which is a publicly traded company in Canada. It's a cable company. So if I were you, Sean, and I wanted to launch this, or if I was a listener and wanted to launch this, I would look up Stingray Communications and I would go and read the filing for that company and I would figure out exactly what Quello does. That's what I would do. And I would learn about how they did it because it's a relatively niche thing. They only have 70,000 subscribers. It's not huge and they've been at it for 10 years. So, it's not a big number. And I think it is incredibly viable business. And I think it's great. Nice. Another thing that I would do is I would look up Discovery. Discovery Channel and then National Geographic. Are you familiar? You're familiar with National Geographic, obviously, right? Okay. National Geographic is still a huge company. It, it, uh, uh, Disney recently bought into it at a billion dollar valuation and they still make, they still make hundreds of thousands or, um, hundreds of millions of dollars a year from their magazine subscription. Is that crazy?
That's insane.
And so I would figure, but they, but here National Geographic was a nonprofit. And, and so the good thing about nonprofits is you can go and see all the numbers. And so what I would go and look at, I would look at Discovery and I would look at National Geographic and I would look at Kwello and I would see what they are doing because those are relatively niche subscription companies that crush. So long story short, great idea.
