It's interesting how you can buy 2 new cars for the price of making that website. It's a freaking website people. With text and images. And you can download something. And there's a donate button. Not rocket science. Not a huge multi-man multi-month effort. Or if it is then it's being done wrong.
In other news... it's good to be in the business of making websites for celebrity techno-newbs. :)
On a related note, I once had a conversation with a potential client who told me they'd spent $3 million to make their website. I about lost it. Text and images people. Forms. Buttons. Stylesheets. Not "hard" in the same league as buying 30 Tesla Roadsters market value kind of hard.
And no I will not tell any of you who that client was! bats your fingers away
This website had to stand up to Reddit/HN/Slashdot/Digg/Fark all at the same time. Not only that, but it had to continue functioning, people still had to be able to download the video they just paid for. You and I would be able to put this together ourselves no problem, but I could see why Louis would want to pay money to just have it taken care of.
Also, that figure might include the cost for bandwidth that it has cost to serve up the 1.2 GB file.
Bandwidth for the videos was provided by Amazon S3 directly[1]. So if he brought in half a million dollars in 5 days from selling his video at $5, that's 100,000 purchases, and if everyone only downloaded the 720p video at 1.2GB that's 30TB per day, hosted only at Amazon's Northern California location, it would end up costing almost $10,000 in bandwidth (priced as an entire month). Shit aint cheap, but at $5 each, he makes a decent profit. That's just for the 4 days he provided numbers for.
[1] The link download link ends up resolving to http://download.aws.louisck.net/ (even if you stuck the video filename on the end of that, it's a signed URL, so you're SOL unless you go through his website after paying him money)
Oh yes, I am aware it was hosted directly by S3. So $12,000 for the website itself, then another $20,000 in infrastructure costs (S3 hosting, cloudfront or whatever else he used to host his actual assets, something to do dynamic pages and PayPal integration for instant receipt of downloads for buyers).
The $32,000 number quoted at that point is not even that bad.
The thing about 32k is that after taxes and overhead, it really isn't that much. That is 3 people working for 3 months. And the fact that this website didn't fall over when half a million people hit it means that they were doing something right.
