I get the impression Hayden even lies about his funding to a significant degree. It's like he intentionally comes as close as possible to achieve a 100% truth failure, with only the tiniest amounts of his twaddle having any validity whatsoever.
The partnership with Dailymotion was legit: there's some press releases form DM themselves
here and
here, as well as a certain amount of coverage on various blogs and sites, including
Reuters.
Googling "dailymotion cabonauts" will bring up a fair bit of info.
Of course that doesn't tell us how much funding he recieved, but for once he's not lying about the series having been made in cooperation with Dailymotion.
I'm not very knowledgeable about how these business deals work, but it doesn't seem completely unlikely that such a partnership involved money- at the very least, DailyMotion must've paid him in exchange for securing exclusive rights to the first season.
That makes the fact that their famed deal went bellly up after one episode even more intriguing.
The DM press release says:
Yet the show obviously has terrible production values, its quality is on par with Gen Zed.
In my opinion, there's two possible hypotheses:
- Hayden displayed his usual incompetence; he waas incapable of making anything but an incredibly shitty show, even with corporate backing. The ratings/view counts were dismal so DM cut their losses quickly and kicked Strokeface to the curb.
- Hayden promised a HD, TV-quality show so he could get those sweet sweet corporate $$$, then pocketed most of the money and hastily cobbed together a product that cost as little effort and money as possible. DM saw the resulting low-effort, shoddily-made drivel, understood where their money had gone and pulled the plug.
Either way, Dailymotion did a 180 and backed out right after they saw the pilot, so it can't have been any good.
I still think Hayden got some money out of it, since he went on to make another shit show- the rebooted
Goodnight Burbank- the very next year.