Tucker Carlson Interviews Vladmir Putin and gets over 179 million views just on X alone, Superbowl ads, and Why media sites are shutting down their subscription products

0:00All 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. So 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 live stream? Yes. Okay. He live streamed it on X. Yeah. That's why I didn't know that. Yeah. Or that's at least I didn't watch it live, 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 p.m.

0:38or 4 p.m. 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, right? 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's it's 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 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 watch only one hour i'm gonna go home and watch the rest after i get my food yeah it was definitely interesting uh 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 someone was like neil's the more level-headed one um eric's talking about you know um uh trump's marketing elon's mark 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 the number one anchor anchor anchor yeah he was an user man yeah that's true like ron jeremy yeah yeah so he was an anchorman jeremy's the porn star ron jeremy is it yeah what's the guy's name wrong what ron ron ron 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 anchor man and he got fired from fox because i think there were some disagreements on what he was talking about versus some of the advertisers and then on the flip side when he ended up uh going out on his own people offered him a lot of money to join up like the guy who created a little tainment yeah a hundred million dollar contract and he put it on twitter yeah yeah uh 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.

2:52Tucker Carlson network. Yeah. 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 hours later, it's like four hours later, it was like 9 million views.

3:23Oh, wow. But it streamed better on his website than X. Because I think too many people are 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, he has other interviews and he talks about stuff like the borders or whatever it may be.

4:06And 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 a million dollars in revenue, way more than that. I bet he runs Google ads for his own name. I would too. Yeah. Um, 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, uh, you get access to five 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?

4:42He's doing one with Snowden too. That's going to be coming out as well. And his personal inbox to ask him anything you want. So for nine bucks a month or six bucks a month, that's pretty good. And I think a lot of people would pay for annual. I don't know how he's going to manage the inbox because my inbox is bad and he has a way bigger brand than I do. No, like a hundred X has to be like a Reddit voting thing. Whatever gets most questions get 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?

5:14Yes. 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, but David from Valuetainment has said, this election cycle is going to be the last time that media has all the power. 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 four years, but I think we're seeing it slide in that direction. 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 slash agency.

5:45Once again, it's marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more. And now back to the show. 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. And you have to, I mean, just like this, this Putin interview, like you have to control the narrative. I'm actually listening to this podcast where it talks about Napoleon, the guy that the conqueror.

6:23Right. And his whole thing is you have to control the message. You have to control the narrative. You have to over communicate. 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 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, 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.

7:00What was released to Russia? like Russian citizens no no I'm talking about in the Tucker Carlson oh yeah for sure I mean you can tell he was trying to control it 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 five ten 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.

7:30And 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 we could probably get to the point where he'll interview Xi Jinping as well. And I think it's helpful to listen to perspectives from everyone. And Lex Rieblin wants to do the same thing. He wants to talk to Putin too.

7:58I 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 and let everyone make their own decision. And people don't like that. Yeah, dude, I'm looking at 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 it 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 You get what I mean?

8:50Yeah. 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 a Vladimir put an interview on our podcast, I get we're going to get tons of impressions. So theory will 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 ad in.

9:19Yep. Not spend any money. Yep. So that's that. And speaking of ads, dude, you know, by the time you guys listen to this, it'll be past the day, but tomorrow is a Superbowl. Did you know that a company spends on average over$230 ,000 per second on a commercial? Isn't it? Uh, isn't each commercial like 6 million bucks now? 3 million bucks. Okay. 6 million, 7 million bucks 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, cause you have to remember when you're watching the Superbowl, there's prime spots for Superbowl ads and there's non-prime spots.

9:59If you want good spots, they typically want you to buy more ads for other backend stuff. I've seen it in many cases, you have to buy like 18 million more on the backend. Wow. So it's, 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 Mercury,$35 million. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design first no code website builder that lets anyone ship a production ready site in minutes.

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12:13Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school. Shopify.com slash marketing school. You're typically looking at 25 to 35 million. I wonder how Gary Vee got. Remember when Gary Vee did the crypto bowl? He did like two or three commercials. I wonder the crypto bowl yeah so there's a I think wait what's a crypto bowl no this was like maybe three years ago or so two 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 it 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 how much do you think these people are getting paid per creative like a million bucks five million bucks or so because I knew Gary Vee did a couple, like one was with J-Lo, he had a couple of celebs and all that.

13:11Are you talking about the cost including the celebs or not including the celebs? I already know. 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 one to$2 million. The rest of the money, like if you're spending seven, eight million, the rest of the money is spent on the celeb talent. Assuming you're getting big celebrities. I think we can wrap this one up with, Because we talked about media so much, I have this tweet over here open from Austin Reif, one of the co-founders of Morning Brew. So he's a CEO now. So you see in this tweet, PetCrunch is shuttering its subscription service TC Plus as it pushes to reorient its coverage around investors amid layoffs.

13:53Washington Post has lost roughly 500 ,000 subscribers since its Trump era peak. It's 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 approach. And then Gannett, 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 pullback 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.

14:24Now, when you look at Tucker Carlson's content, it's like, that's good content. Yeah. That's why it works. Yes. And I now understand why he didn't want to take a hundred million dollar deal because he probably made more than, because it's only what, 20 a year or something like that. He'll make more than$20 million in revenue just from the - And he was comfortable. It takes a lot of guts to be fired and say, be offered like a hundred here, but like to know that in the longterm, betting on yourself, you know, you're like, you already know you're a monster. Yeah. You know, you're worth a lot. Yes.

14:52Yeah. So I find that interesting. So anyway, that is for, that's it for today's episode. Please don't forget to rate, rate, rate, subscribe. And oh, also go to marketingschool.io slash agency because we have that application now open for our agency owners program, agency owners association. And we'll see you tomorrow.