It’s been a fun experiment, but we’ll be discontinuing the Bald Movies effective immediately. The response to the pay for content didn’t really work out (we didn’t quite cover the costs of tickets and soda for the movies, haha). We wanted to close out this final week, but the server being down and our schedules tightening is going to prevent that. We’ll be refunding the money people spent on the podcasts and memberships.
I don’t think the experiment didn’t work because of the lack of generosity of our fans; the rates of subscriptions using the free “Prometheus” cast as a baseline were consistent with the percentage of listeners to our regular TV casts vs amazon affiliate usage. I just don’t think there was interest in long form movie coverage from enough of our fans to make it work. Even being free, the Prometheus cast didn’t get 1/30th the traffic our other shows get.
That shouldn’t be surprising, since our bread and butter is TV and not movies; but it was something we wanted to try. We’re thinking of a few more things to try later; previous seasons of existing shows we cover now (Breaking Bad, Mad Men), coverage of shows that are not current (The Wire, Deadwood, etc). We’ll have to see. As always it’s a balancing act between the time we have to do the shows and the money and attention other aspects of our lives require to keep running.
To all the uberfans who braved the shitty membership system and checked out our 4 film casts; thanks very much! Hopefully we’ll come up with something else to get you excited later. In the meantime, hey, only sixteen days until Breaking Bad starts back up!