Skeptic Project

Dear Edward,

In your analysis you estimated the cost of making and shipping a dvd of a Zeitgeist movie is 90 cents. You then say that there would be a 6.10 dollars profit from the sale of these dvds. The prices which come from here http://zeitgeistmovie.com/dvdorder.htm . Now i feel like you have over looked a major expense. Peter Joseph must pay royalties for every clip shown in the movie that he did not create. Many people have let him use these clips for free, but at the same time many have not. I do not know the exact cost for each dvd to cover royalties and I apologize that i could not be more specific, but i feel like this is a major over site and it should be mentioned in the cost section. In all probability the cost of royalties is probably more than 7 dollars again i can't prove that. Thank you for your time i hope you consider a revision to that section.

Sincerly,
Trevor

P.S. please move this to a more appropriate part of the forum if necessary

The only things I can honestly think of that would "require" royalties are the George Carlin clips and the clips from The Network. These exact videos are available on YouTube, and it's far more likely at the time of creating the film he simply added them to his film from YouTube or wherever and didn't contact anyone regarding copyrights.

I have been keeping up with Zeitgeist since it first came out, and TZM since it started, and never have I ever heard Peter Joseph claim to be paying royalties to anyone. Even if he did, the royalties are usually a few cents for clips under 15 seconds (in fact most production companies, as I understand, don't even require royalties for audio or video under 15 seconds for non-commercial purposes) so he'd still make a good profit even if he was paying royalties.

The fact is he still lies about shipping costing $2 when it's no where near that.

So unless someone can prove he's payed royalties or even mentioned paying them, I wouldn't change anything on your analysis yet.

>> You also need to take into account the fact that it would obviously cost a lot of money to keep TheZeitgeistMovement.com online because of the ridiculous amount of traffic that it gets.

28,000 page views a day could easily be hosted for $50/m, and that is how many page views the domain gets -- to warrant $1,000 a month range, you'd need about half a million page views a day.

Besides, the first film was out for over a year before thezeitgeistmovement.com came along, and it wasn't always in his plans. Prior to his new semi-technocratic outlook, zeitgeistthemovie.com promoted the hell out of Ron Paul.

>> And Eric, in many ways he's not 'lying' about the shipping either. To ship the film to Australia or Norway, for example, costs more than it does to post it within the United States. You have to allow for those sorts of things.

That's true, which is why on the Buy DVD page he has US Shipping via USPS which he claims is $2, and International shipping as $3.50. If you look up the type of package he says on the site for US shipping, anywhere in the US, it's far less than $2, it's irrelevant how much international shipping costs when he uses this amount just for US shipping alone.

>> The other important thing to denote is that nobody actually HAS to buy either of the films because they're available completely for free as high quality torrents with instructions for how to burn them onto DVD.

Yes, and most other big time conspiracy theorists use that same logic when cornered with selling things. But the fact is people DO buy it, you can go around and find forum posts of people saying they bought multiple DVDs. If nobody bought them, he wouldn't be selling them.

You still didn't get into the specifics of what programs required royalties and how much. Not even Alex Jones pays royalties and he has millions of fans, far more than Peter Joseph does, even though me saying that might hurt some egos, it's true. So, don't be surprised if I'm skeptical of PJ claiming he pays royalties when for the first couple of years he never once mentioned ever paying any, and he's probably the only conspiracy theorist on Earth that does.

Also, how do you pay royalties with videos floating around the Internet? It'd best be calculated on how many he's selling, and if he says he's spending a lot, maybe he's selling more than you think.

The original point of the cost page was that it didn't cost $5 to make a DVD and $2 to ship it, period.

In this thread and the related video, PJ claimed that it cost $120,000 to make Zeitgeist Addendum, and half that to make the first Zeitgeist, with most of the money being spent on royalty fees:

http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_kunena&Itemid=99999&func=view&catid=231&id=118236

The problem is that if he is selling the DVD's just to pay for the cost of the movie, he seems to be wasting his money. Because he could have just used the footage without paying for it and it wouldn't matter as long as he wasn't making money off of it. Youtube is filled with videos that rip off footage from real movies, but people don't face legal action for making these.

The other thing is that on the site he sells t-shirts, which are supposed to pay for the site. So if we are to believe everything he says, he spent $180,000 on two videos that he makes no money from, but at the same time he needs to sell $15 T-shirts just to pay for the website:

http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=26&Itemid=63

What is Peter Joseph's day job? He is a video editor or something. Even if he paid for Zeitgeist 2 with the money from Zeitgeist 1, how did he have $60,000 to throw away on the first movie? He implies that he didn't pay to license the footage used in the first Z until after the video became popular. Was that before or after he started selling DVD's?

Imagine if I called up the people who manage George Carlin's estate or whatever, and I told them that I had made a movie that ripped off footage of George Carlin and I was selling it, and now I was ready to pay for the rights to use it. Would they actually negotiate with me or would they call their lawyers? Would the people who own the rights to George Carlin's video even license it out to just anyone?

Perhapse someone should contact one of the companies that own this footage and ask, like the TV station that PJ supposedly gave $20,000 to use a clip of Krishnamurti.

But I agree with Frank, the money shouldn't matter much, on the Zeitgeist forums this seems to be the easiest way to dismiss this site but it has nothing to do with the content of Zeitgeist.

>> Not if you want the page to load quickly (and we're already beginning to notice lag problems with the website).

Bandwidth is getting cheaper and cheaper, even just a few years ago to cost much more than it does today.

>> used to be a regular player on a gaming website when I was a few years younger (it was called 'Subeta'). It has a considerably small user based (never more than 1200 users online at the busiest time) and it costs well over a thousand dollars a month in server costs to maintain that website.

Probably because they didn't have much caching, didn't scale correctly, and ended up using multiple servers for different things. Zeitgeist is a regular Joomla setup. You're also assuming that all of the 35,000 or whatever registered users are online at the same time, or around the same time. I'd venture to guess the majority of the time, with 28,000 page views a day, you probably have a couple of thousand people showing up. That's peanuts with today's bandwidth, database serving, etc. A friend of mine gets 30,000 page views per day, he pays $100 a month for a co-location, his pages load just fine, and he also hosts other sites as well on the same server with the same bandwidth

I make my living off of high scalability, and I've seen people blow through money because they didn't have cache servers and so forth, but like I said, Zeitgeist Movement is a simple Joomla setup, so if it's honestly costing $1,000+ a month, just like with his DVDs, maybe he should find a new place to host, because that's total bullshit. I don't know of a client that's not a complete moron that would pay that much for 28K page views.

And no, Alex Jones doesn't pay royalties, except he may pay to interview certain people in his movies, but that's doubtful. He also flies all over the place to make his films. Then there's the fact that Alex Jones lies all the time, so if he said it cost a quarter of a million, I'd say it's $50,000.

So if Peter Joseph tells you it cost $2 to ship, but USPS doesn't say that, you'll believe it? If he says it costs $5 to burn a CD, you'll believe it? And if PJ says he retroactively went to pay royalties on something that likely wouldn't have been notice, you automatically trust it? Interesting. Maybe this is how religious leaders swindle people out of so much money.

As Frank said, if you believe my analyses are wrong, then why are you making so much effort to argue about the actual cost of DVDs? You can run through the numbers yourself, but I wouldn't insert any variables unless you know them to be real, not just some guy's word who's never admitted being wrong.

Are you trying to convince me that I'm wrong and he isn't swindling people, or are you trying to convince yourself?

If you have problems with my analyses, say so, don't concentrate on something so insignificant as my demonstrating the cost isn't 100% profitless.

Here's a link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANpnPSlwm1M

Now find a conspiracy film that's ever done that too.

>> That has been removed due to a copyright claim Edward, so I think the point I'm trying to get across in that regard has been quite well made by you yourself.

That's my point, a stupid video that didn't get permission was removed, yet there's no conspiracy film that I'm aware of that's ever been removed for the same thing. Alex Jones who's far more popular than Zeitgeist hasn't even suffered through that. Conspiracy films and edgy films in general aren't that popular. Yes, Zeitgeist has had a lot of views on Google video and such, but how many of those were actual uniques? how many people actually watched the video and didn't just click the link to it, then close it when they realized it was a video?

>> He pays a programmer full time to maintain the Movement website.

A full time job to setup Joomla? Where can I turn in my resume?

>> Granted there are additions constantly being made, no?

Well if that's the case, Joomla's codebase is so nutty, you might need to hire an entire firm to add a simple thing (just kidding)

That KeithTruth thing sounds so familiar, I think someone might have mentioned it to me before, but I'm not sure.

But you mean to tell me Zeitgeist isn't "NWO Theosophic Illuminati doctrine"? That's news to me!

Equities trader huh? They do look a lot alike I must say. As I recall, PJ said he edited TV or something for a living.

What would be nice would be to also compare the voices if possible, considering they way PJ talks, along with his voice, makes him stand out quite a bit I believe.

How'd you figure this stuff out Sky?

@Sky:

Wow I think this is actually him :D

I googled "Gentle Machine Productions" and I didn't get any official website, but did find this:

[i]"10.54
Bach: Chorale, 'Ich hab' mein Sach' Gott heimgestellt
PJ Merola (marimba)
Album: JS Bach on marimba
Gentle Machine Productions GMP001 tr. 3 (2.11) "[/i]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/abachchristmas/pip/v32q2/</p>

Then I googled PJ Merola and you get this

http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Merola-PJ.htm</p>

So he lives in NYC and the picture on the right looks EXACTLY like him apart from the long hair.

Then back to the picture you can see at Democratic Underground: http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y51/salvorhardin/zeit.jpg</p>

And his name is right there along with "Gentle Machines" and now I notice it also says "....for solo percussion" so the information on the BBC is probably him.

I think its been cracked now. I guess he made the mistake of using his real name back them.

What is that video supposed to show?

Looks like a typical New Age utopian cult with a troll for a guru.

@Matt: You talking to me, or the other Edward? If its me I don't know what you mean :)

Back on the original subject, I found a post where PJ claims how much money it costs to run his site:

http://thezeitgeistmovement.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_kunena&Itemid=99999&func=view&catid=234&id=223013&limit=10&limitstart=10#223175

"Money for shirts goes towards website/operation costs. As of now, it has come down to about 600 a month for the server, upkeep, maintenance, improvement. This cost goes up when new features are added.
(When I first started it was about 2000 a month for cost/labor)"

The cost goes up when new features are added, but it has gone down since he first started?

?