The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► So Glenn Fleishman welcome to the talk show. Thanks for having me on. All right, so let's just

00:00:04 ◼   ► run down the balls you've got in the air. So you're I think and I think this is new since

00:00:10 ◼   ► the last time you were on this show is that I think that you're now the owner publisher editor

00:00:18 ◼   ► or not editor. I'm not sure about that of the magazine. I'm everything. I'm the bottle washer.

00:00:24 ◼   ► Yeah, I think I was on just before Mark when I did the deal or a few months before it was

00:00:29 ◼   ► So, living longer than that.

00:00:31 ◼   ► Oh, no, it was actually, I think after I came on as editor,

00:00:34 ◼   ► yeah, when Marco sold everything, except his dog

00:00:38 ◼   ► and children and child in May and June,

00:00:42 ◼   ► it was a very funny time.

00:00:43 ◼   ► But yeah, it was a logical thing.

00:00:45 ◼   ► I mean, I love doing this and Marco's a programmer

00:00:50 ◼   ► and the cycle is really different

00:00:51 ◼   ► between being a programmer and a publisher.

00:00:53 ◼   ► And I think the timing was great

00:00:54 ◼   ► when he was ready to move on with his new endeavors,

00:00:57 ◼   ► do not no longer secret podcast thing.

00:00:59 ◼   ► All right. But anyway, you're running an entire magazine, a weekly magazine,

00:01:03 ◼   ► no biweekly.

00:01:04 ◼   ► That's correct. Fortnightly every two weeks.

00:01:07 ◼   ► Isn't, isn't biweekly one of those words that can mean two different things?

00:01:13 ◼   ► Yeah. It's like, can you quick annual perennial,

00:01:16 ◼   ► which means every year and which means, uh, they only once.

00:01:20 ◼   ► No, they both mean every year.

00:01:22 ◼   ► No. And annual plant. Oh, I think it's the plant annual, uh, in plants,

00:01:27 ◼   ► I guess is the thing is it only comes out once and a perennial will bloom again every

00:01:30 ◼   ► year.

00:01:31 ◼   ► I don't get it.

00:01:32 ◼   ► It's language. Language is a problem. Yeah, biweekly used to be, not sometimes people

00:01:36 ◼   ► say semi-weekly.

00:01:37 ◼   ► No, bi-monthly. Isn't bi-monthly? Bi-monthly can mean twice a month or every two months.

00:01:42 ◼   ► The language has evolved to where most people will say semi-monthly or twice a month and

00:01:46 ◼   ► then bi-monthly means every other month. But it's, yeah, it's becoming, in periodicals

00:01:51 ◼   ► it's becoming more common because publications are reducing their frequency. New York Magazine

00:01:56 ◼   ► is going to every other week now, for instance, after many, many years of being weekly.

00:02:01 ◼   ► Right. I saw that.

00:02:03 ◼   ► It's interesting.

00:02:05 ◼   ► Just read it off topic. I have a whole bunch of on topic stuff for this show. But there

00:02:13 ◼   ► was a, they have a great article. I don't think I've, yeah, I have not yet linked it

00:02:17 ◼   ► from Daring Fireball, but by the time the show comes out, I will have a cover story

00:02:22 ◼   ► on the new issue of New York Magazine about Alex Rodriguez, the New York Yankees embattled

00:02:27 ◼   ► superstar. And it's one of the finest pieces of journalism that I've read in a long time

00:02:34 ◼   ► because there's this whole thing where he's been accused of using performance-enhancing

00:02:38 ◼   ► drugs and he was issued a 211-game suspension. And he's fought it and nobody really knows

00:02:45 ◼   ► what the hell is going on. And this article, and I follow it as a Yankees fan, I've been

00:02:49 ◼   ► following the saga, you know, pretty avidly, I guess I would say, you know, all year long.

00:03:00 ◼   ► And still had no idea. Like, to me, it still has never been clear just what evidence they

00:03:04 ◼   ► had against him. They must have had something, blah, blah, blah. This article makes the whole

00:03:09 ◼   ► thing clear, and you really—it's really journalism at its finest.

00:03:13 ◼   ► mhmm. Yeah, it's a funny thing. Journalism is a problem because the best kind of journalism

00:03:18 ◼   ► that we think we like the most, that we, like, sticks with us and you may go back and read

00:03:24 ◼   ► or it turns into a book or it changes the law or whatever. That stuff is so ridiculously

00:03:30 ◼   ► unprofitable, it costs so much money to do that entire news organizations are devoted

00:03:36 ◼   ► to making enough money to afford to be able to do that sort of journalism.

00:03:39 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah.

00:03:40 ◼   ► Pete; Because it just, I mean, the Seattle Times, I always cite them because they're

00:03:43 ◼   ► a family-run paper and the family is really weird and they've made some really terrible

00:03:47 ◼   ► business decisions, but it's still 51% owned by the family that bought it in the 1800s.

00:03:51 ◼   ► And they will do things like spend $2 million for a two-year investigation into the Washington

00:03:56 ◼   ► State Court's ceiling documents inappropriately and cause massive positive political social

00:04:02 ◼   ► change.

00:04:03 ◼   ► They did not make $2 million off that, right?

00:04:05 ◼   ► I mean, everything else they did subsidized that $2 million so that could happen, and

00:04:10 ◼   ► they have to actually believe in their mission enough and believe that it gives them an aura

00:04:13 ◼   ► that keeps subscribers or brings subscribers in

00:04:15 ◼   ► that it was worth it.

00:04:17 ◼   ► And that's a hard sell.

00:04:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, and just, you know, this article I'm talking about,

00:04:23 ◼   ► just titled "Chasing A-Rod,"

00:04:25 ◼   ► and it is written by, hold on,

00:04:29 ◼   ► I've gotta go back to page one, goddamn pagination,

00:04:33 ◼   ► which I wanna get into, Steve Fishman,

00:04:36 ◼   ► who wrote this cover story.

00:04:37 ◼   ► - Related to me, of course, no, no, sorry.

00:04:39 ◼   ► - And it was a monumental effort.

00:04:42 ◼   ► effort. It really is, you know, and the best of feature-length magazine writing is much

00:04:49 ◼   ► closer to, in scope, to book writing than to, you know, article writing. It's closer

00:04:57 ◼   ► to a miniature book than it is to what, you know, to me an article is somewhere around

00:05:03 ◼   ► a thousand words.

00:05:04 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

00:05:05 ◼   ► And once you get past that, you know, you're somehow, you're taking on something that needs

00:05:10 ◼   ► a lot more nurturing work. But this is a guy who traveled to Miami. That's where Alex Rodriguez

00:05:16 ◼   ► lives and a big part of the reason this article is so interesting is that he's the first journalist

00:05:22 ◼   ► who Alex Rodriguez had opened up to. And so he traveled to Miami and hung out with him

00:05:32 ◼   ► and was there. He spent time in New York in the, not a trial, but an arbitration hearing

00:05:39 ◼   ► with Major League Baseball.

00:05:42 ◼   ► You know, that's putting your ass in the seat in a room where there, you know, those things,

00:05:47 ◼   ► anybody who's ever been in a courtroom, you've ever done, you know, jury duty or even just

00:05:51 ◼   ► gotten out of jury duty, you know that all those things, they go slowly.

00:05:54 ◼   ► It's days, you know, of just waiting for what, you know, a couple of paragraphs.

00:06:01 ◼   ► And in the meantime, you know, the guy's a writer, bills have to be paid, you know, so

00:06:05 ◼   ► it takes money to gather, just to gather the reporting,

00:06:09 ◼   ► let alone the time it takes to write the actual article.

00:06:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, I remember reading,

00:06:14 ◼   ► Neal Stephenson wrote a piece for Wired years ago

00:06:16 ◼   ► where he traced fiber optic cable around the world.

00:06:19 ◼   ► And I read it and I thought, A, this is,

00:06:22 ◼   ► I mean, he's still, you know, top of his career,

00:06:24 ◼   ► but this is when he was really on the peak.

00:06:25 ◼   ► So he's getting massive amounts of advances

00:06:27 ◼   ► and selling millions of books.

00:06:28 ◼   ► And I thought, A, how much money

00:06:30 ◼   ► do they have to pay him for a fee?

00:06:31 ◼   ► But B, reading all the places he went,

00:06:34 ◼   ► I'm thinking he had like a $75,000 expense budget,

00:06:39 ◼   ► traveling coach, staying in two star hotels

00:06:42 ◼   ► because of the 50 places he went

00:06:44 ◼   ► and just the sheer amount of time.

00:06:46 ◼   ► It's astonishing the amount.

00:06:48 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, that's the thing.

00:06:49 ◼   ► He's a thousand words.

00:06:50 ◼   ► You could talk to someone on the phone

00:06:51 ◼   ► and write a thousand words in a 20 minute conversation,

00:06:54 ◼   ► 10 minute conversation and write about one thing.

00:06:56 ◼   ► But when you get beyond that,

00:06:57 ◼   ► you have to start to shape a narrative

00:06:59 ◼   ► and you have to start doing research.

00:07:00 ◼   ► You have to have things that go beyond

00:07:03 ◼   ► the obvious or a few quotations because otherwise, like, what are you writing about for that

00:07:07 ◼   ► long? There's not enough to say. I mean, people write philosophical essays that are

00:07:10 ◼   ► longer, but if you're writing about news and real things, then, you know.

00:07:14 ◼   ► Ben de la Torre Yeah, and so that's—I still feel—and

00:07:18 ◼   ► I feel like it's a good topic to talk to you about is, where does the money for this

00:07:24 ◼   ► type of work continue to come from as we move forward into a BuzzFeed-driven world?

00:07:29 ◼   ► That's what I'm asking. Where does it come from?

00:07:32 ◼   ► Um, you know, and I don't even know where to start, but with, uh, just stuff in the

00:07:40 ◼   ► last week, you know, where over Thanksgiving, did you follow, you had to follow this, this

00:07:47 ◼   ► Elan/Gail saga?

00:07:48 ◼   ► Oh yeah, that was, yeah, and I felt very bad for my sped about myself. At first I thought

00:07:54 ◼   ► it was hilarious, and I thought, "Oh no, wait, the guy's a dick," and then I thought,

00:07:57 ◼   ► no, this can't even be true, went through regret.

00:08:02 ◼   ► - For anybody who missed it, Elon Gale,

00:08:04 ◼   ► who I never heard of before,

00:08:04 ◼   ► but he's apparently the producer, executive producer

00:08:07 ◼   ► of a bunch of really shitty reality shows

00:08:09 ◼   ► like The Bachelor and The Bachelorette and something else.

00:08:13 ◼   ► And over Thanksgiving, I guess on the day,

00:08:16 ◼   ► he tweeted a series of tweets ostensibly live

00:08:19 ◼   ► from a wifi equipped plane about a terrible woman

00:08:23 ◼   ► a few rows ahead of him who was,

00:08:26 ◼   ► know, berating the crew because their flight was delayed.

00:08:33 ◼   ► And this woman, you know, and it ends up, and then he sent her notes and drinks and

00:08:40 ◼   ► got really rude with her.

00:08:41 ◼   ► And that was the part, there's two weird parts to it.

00:08:43 ◼   ► Like the weirdest part is that it ends up the whole thing was fake.

00:08:46 ◼   ► He made the whole thing up.

00:08:47 ◼   ► But a lot of, you know, but it was all presented as being true.

00:08:50 ◼   ► And even on Twitter when people said, "Hey, is this fake?" and he denied it.

00:08:58 ◼   ► But the other thing too was that even if it was true, yeah, like you said, at first...and

00:09:06 ◼   ► it was like a slow boiling frog where his behavior to the woman at first, if it were

00:09:10 ◼   ► true, was kind of funny.

00:09:11 ◼   ► But then when he started sending notes to her that said, "Eat my dick," that's over

00:09:18 ◼   ► the line.

00:09:19 ◼   ► actually a really creepy thing to do, even if it were true.

00:09:23 ◼   ► I mean, that's sort of--

00:09:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, that kind of thing could get you arrested.

00:09:27 ◼   ► Everyone in the situation could get arrested,

00:09:29 ◼   ► and then she allegedly, he said she slapped him

00:09:32 ◼   ► and nothing happened, the police weren't called,

00:09:35 ◼   ► and it was a weird story.

00:09:38 ◼   ► Well, it started out, I mean, this is that,

00:09:41 ◼   ► he was channeling that rage we all have now

00:09:44 ◼   ► because the airlines pack us in,

00:09:46 ◼   ► and the flying experience is horrible,

00:09:48 ◼   ► and all the planes are full and everything is bad about flying.

00:09:52 ◼   ► And he did a great job tapping into that feeling where we see,

00:09:56 ◼   ► like, we feel like we are surrounded by horrible people.

00:10:00 ◼   ► Even if they're perfectly nice in other circumstances,

00:10:02 ◼   ► everyone is pushed to the limit.

00:10:03 ◼   ► And he's like, all right, you know, so I'm taking action.

00:10:05 ◼   ► It's like, all right, that's great.

00:10:06 ◼   ► Then it's like, oh, but you're a dick.

00:10:08 ◼   ► That you're being a dick.

00:10:09 ◼   ► It's like, ugh.

00:10:10 ◼   ► - The thing is, is it turned into a sensation.

00:10:12 ◼   ► I mean, then, you know, a multi-million page view sensation

00:10:17 ◼   ► on sites like Buzzfeed and I don't know if the Huffington Post picked it up, but I know

00:10:20 ◼   ► Buzzfeed did and probably did as much as anybody to drive it as a, I hate to say this, viral

00:10:28 ◼   ► meme, I don't know, or story. But here's the thing, even if it were true, it is kind of

00:10:35 ◼   ► bullshit to be the biggest story of the day and it ends up the whole thing was a hoax

00:10:40 ◼   ► and was rather easily verified as a hoax or at least nobody did any work to actually see

00:10:46 ◼   ► if it were true. And yet that, everything has continued to devolve. Even though everybody

00:10:53 ◼   ► knows that page views are so problematic as a measure of advertising in so many ways,

00:11:01 ◼   ► the publishing world has continued to, even knowing how poisonous this whole model is,

00:11:07 ◼   ► has continued to devolve in that direction. And I can't think of, it's as good an example

00:11:12 ◼   ► as anything.

00:11:13 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah, I mean, look, here's the example of where we're at, is that Business Insider

00:11:18 ◼   ► running, you know, they've got all kinds of opinions about them, of course, and how they

00:11:22 ◼   ► fight, they follow page views.

00:11:26 ◼   ► The bit that one of their editors wrote about his rebooked trip to China where it was paid

00:11:30 ◼   ► for by the Chinese airline, that whole crazy story, they got like 1.5 million page views

00:11:36 ◼   ► or something, a story about how he was traveling in the lap of luxury and he took a bunch of

00:11:41 ◼   ► of pictures and Henry Blodgett's awful thing

00:11:44 ◼   ► about being cramped and I don't know,

00:11:45 ◼   ► American Airlines flight last year or whenever that was,

00:11:47 ◼   ► that got hundreds of thousands of views.

00:11:49 ◼   ► So they figured out how to tap people's sort of

00:11:53 ◼   ► prurient or I don't know what it is like,

00:11:56 ◼   ► it's lolcat interest and turn it into massive traffic

00:12:00 ◼   ► and then they sell that massive traffic

00:12:01 ◼   ► at an incredibly, incredibly low rate.

00:12:04 ◼   ► So they have to have billions of views

00:12:06 ◼   ► to make any kind of real money in any case.

00:12:08 ◼   ► But they're finding people who will come and read the stuff.

00:12:11 ◼   ► So there is an audience for it.

00:12:12 ◼   ► - And there's no chance that that sort of crap

00:12:17 ◼   ► is going to go away.

00:12:19 ◼   ► And I'm not even saying it should.

00:12:21 ◼   ► I mean, and then, you know, and in some sense, you know,

00:12:23 ◼   ► like this Elon Gale guy, his professional career

00:12:26 ◼   ► is an example of that, you know, where--

00:12:28 ◼   ► - Yes, we have to remember how classy he is

00:12:30 ◼   ► in his day job too.

00:12:31 ◼   ► - Right, but it really does show you.

00:12:33 ◼   ► I mean, and if you watch, or even just tune in, you know,

00:12:38 ◼   ► halfway through any random episode

00:12:40 ◼   ► of one of these reality shows, with a critical eye,

00:12:44 ◼   ► you can really see just how the whole thing,

00:12:47 ◼   ► it really, the word reality needs dick quotes around it,

00:12:51 ◼   ► because it's, how could it be?

00:12:54 ◼   ► You know, like where these regular characters enter a room,

00:12:58 ◼   ► and somebody who they're ostensibly meeting

00:13:01 ◼   ► documentary style, you know, for real,

00:13:04 ◼   ► is already wearing a lav mic?

00:13:07 ◼   ► You know, it's like, it's almost like how can you possibly believe that this is real

00:13:12 ◼   ► if the people they're meeting, you know, in a restaurant or something have already

00:13:15 ◼   ► been mic'd?

00:13:16 ◼   ► Oh, I saw that the other day. Someone was mentioning that, like, if you see, if a random

00:13:20 ◼   ► person that someone meets in a reality show is already mic'd for sound, it's not a

00:13:24 ◼   ► random person. Like, oh, well, yes, but you don't--

00:13:27 ◼   ► Yeah, I think you must have seen the same tweet, right?

00:13:29 ◼   ► You don't think that's how-- it's a good tell. That was the same thing with the Elon

00:13:31 ◼   ► situation. As someone pointed out a couple days afterwards, said the picture where he

00:13:35 ◼   ► posted the note with the glass of wine, he couldn't have taken that because that would

00:13:39 ◼   ► have meant that he had gotten up and was standing next to her taking the photo before she, whatever,

00:13:44 ◼   ► there's no way that would have worked. Like, he, it doesn't make any sense. It's like,

00:13:48 ◼   ► "Oh, you're right." It was internally inconsistent. Nick Bilton at the New York

00:13:52 ◼   ► Times was actually looking at flight schedules and so forth and correlating them with tweets

00:13:56 ◼   ► and decided it was nonsense just based on that. It cracked me up.

00:14:00 ◼   ► That's funny.

00:14:01 ◼   ► I thought it was my first, I don't know,

00:14:03 ◼   ► something set me off on it right away,

00:14:05 ◼   ► and my first thing was that, and maybe it's my ears,

00:14:08 ◼   ► I don't know, like I've said this before in the show,

00:14:10 ◼   ► I worry a little bit, and it runs in my family,

00:14:12 ◼   ► that hearing loss in the men, in the Gruber family,

00:14:15 ◼   ► is sort of a problem.

00:14:17 ◼   ► So maybe it's just me, but I have trouble,

00:14:22 ◼   ► like when we sit, like if my family travels,

00:14:25 ◼   ► and Amy and I both take aisle seats,

00:14:29 ◼   ► and maybe Jonas sits in the middle next to Amy,

00:14:32 ◼   ► I have trouble hearing Amy across the aisle.

00:14:34 ◼   ► Like if, you know, like if I'm 7C and she's 7D,

00:14:39 ◼   ► I have trouble hearing her on this ship because,

00:14:43 ◼   ► you know, or on the plane,

00:14:44 ◼   ► because she doesn't wanna talk real loud, you know.

00:14:47 ◼   ► And he said she was, I don't know, five rows ahead of her,

00:14:50 ◼   ► three or four rows ahead of her?

00:14:52 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, yeah.

00:14:53 ◼   ► - It's really hard to overhear somebody,

00:14:55 ◼   ► Even if somebody was really, you know, sort of being abusive toward the flight crew, if

00:15:02 ◼   ► she's sitting five rows ahead of you, it's really pretty hard.

00:15:04 ◼   ► Plus, the whole thing, like, it was repeated endlessly over and over and over again that

00:15:09 ◼   ► she was Diane in 7A.

00:15:11 ◼   ► Well, 7A is a window seat.

00:15:13 ◼   ► So all this note passing nonsense, it's a little bit more possible if it's like a 747

00:15:20 ◼   ► a 242, you know, with two aisles, because then, you know, I guess he could only have to reach over

00:15:28 ◼   ► one person, 7B. But most planes on domestic flights are not 747s. They're, you know, they're,

00:15:38 ◼   ► forget the numbers.

00:15:41 ◼   ► Pete: They're not narrow-bodied, what they call them, they're mainline, but yeah, they're 727-900.

00:15:46 ◼   ► I just wrote Alaska has an upgraded Boeing that I really liked, I wrote the other day. It actually

00:15:50 ◼   ► has room, I could cross my legs.

00:15:52 ◼   ► But if it's a three seats aisle, three seats setup, then, you know, it's really, it would

00:16:00 ◼   ► be almost impossible to pass a note to somebody in 7A.

00:16:03 ◼   ► Right, but people were repeating this credibly, like, it got turned into news, it got cycled

00:16:08 ◼   ► into news incredibly fast without any actual documentary evidence except his tweets and

00:16:13 ◼   ► people's suppositions, even though if you'd stopped as Nick Bilton did or as you're thinking

00:16:17 ◼   ► about it or other people did looking at the photos, like, anyone with any journalist should

00:16:22 ◼   ► have used their powers of observation and pointed out that this was very clearly fake.

00:16:28 ◼   ► And he was probably, I'm actually curious if the guy himself was astonished that people

00:16:32 ◼   ► took it as real because he had, there were so many tells.

00:16:36 ◼   ► Ted: Yeah, I think he, I think, no, I don't think he was astonished. I think he tried

00:16:39 ◼   ► to fake it and he's, I forget, somebody else pointed out that he has a history of this

00:16:43 ◼   ► sort of thing.

00:16:44 ◼   ► Yeah, but it really shows you what he thinks of as reality. It's you know, it's you know

00:16:50 ◼   ► I guess it's what makes him good at his job, but it makes me think that you know, like I'm The Bachelor. There's probably

00:16:55 ◼   ► You know the like the the what's the idea with The Bachelor and The Bachelorette

00:17:01 ◼   ► There's like a hero character on The Bachelor who's a guy and on The Bachelorette who's a woman and then they present them

00:17:07 ◼   ► I don't know a dozen

00:17:08 ◼   ► people of the opposite gender to pick from

00:17:11 ◼   ► And each week they kick one out.

00:17:14 ◼   ► That the person probably doesn't even kick them out.

00:17:17 ◼   ► The show probably tells them who to pick based on who's the most popular.

00:17:23 ◼   ► That it's probably all as contrived as the whole thing would be if it were run on the

00:17:26 ◼   ► up and up.

00:17:27 ◼   ► It's probably not even run on the up and up.

00:17:29 ◼   ► So, it's true.

00:17:30 ◼   ► And films and TV do that.

00:17:33 ◼   ► I think they have to, or they think they have to.

00:17:37 ◼   ► that came out several years ago,

00:17:40 ◼   ► The King of Kong, Fistful of Quarters, about,

00:17:42 ◼   ► yeah, which a great movie.

00:17:44 ◼   ► - The Donkey Kong. - Really interesting.

00:17:45 ◼   ► - The competition to score the perfect Donkey Kong game.

00:17:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, and there was a villain,

00:17:51 ◼   ► there's this guy Billy who ran a restaurant

00:17:53 ◼   ► and had maybe faked some high scores,

00:17:56 ◼   ► but probably gotten him and he was on the cover

00:17:58 ◼   ► of Newsweek or something in the 80s,

00:18:01 ◼   ► and this up and coming laid off school teacher

00:18:03 ◼   ► who is playing in his garage

00:18:07 ◼   ► and tops of the high score, so he's the hero,

00:18:10 ◼   ► you've got the villain.

00:18:11 ◼   ► Well, there was a piece, and I think it was Atlantic,

00:18:13 ◼   ► after the movie came out by a guy

00:18:14 ◼   ► who had been involved in the shooting a bit,

00:18:16 ◼   ► who said, "Well, Billy really isn't the way he was depicted."

00:18:19 ◼   ► They kind of emphasized things,

00:18:20 ◼   ► but they didn't make stuff up,

00:18:22 ◼   ► but they made him into a villain

00:18:24 ◼   ► because they wanted a goat in the film

00:18:26 ◼   ► for people to root against,

00:18:27 ◼   ► and actually he's much more nuanced,

00:18:28 ◼   ► as everyone is in life.

00:18:29 ◼   ► But it's hard to, I think film and TV

00:18:32 ◼   ► often remove the nuance,

00:18:33 ◼   ► because you can't tell a story as well in those mediums

00:18:35 ◼   ► without having, I don't know, unless it's a really good filmmaker, without having identifiable

00:18:43 ◼   ► people to root for and against. I mean, it's part of human nature, but it's also how a

00:18:46 ◼   ► lot of films are made.

00:18:48 ◼   ► Ben de Mello - Perfectly agree. But I think that stuff is not going to go away. I think

00:18:56 ◼   ► everybody, if you watch it, I think you should watch it with a giant grain of salt. And I

00:19:02 ◼   ► think that's to me is the interesting takeaway from this Elon Gale tweet hoax

00:19:06 ◼   ► thing is not just that his tweet thing was a hoax but what does it tell you

00:19:10 ◼   ► about you know these reality shows that dominate TV you know major network TV

00:19:19 ◼   ► today I saw another tweet a couple days ago from somebody I don't remember who

00:19:23 ◼   ► who just posited that if you showed today's reality shows to someone from

00:19:32 ◼   ► 20 years ago, 25 years ago. They would think it was stuff from a dystopian science fiction future.

00:19:40 ◼   ► Pete: Oh yeah, or they might also, they might actually also see it for the false front it

00:19:48 ◼   ► presents. There's a bit in, it was The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the Oliver Sacks book,

00:19:53 ◼   ► I think it's in that book, where he talks about being in a ward where there are people who had

00:19:57 ◼   ► at aphasia and other people, one group of people could not understand the meanings of

00:20:03 ◼   ► words, but they could hear words literally only. The other could not understand what

00:20:07 ◼   ► words meant, but they could hear the emotion behind it, it was two different neurological

00:20:10 ◼   ► conditions, and he watched them watching Ronald Reagan deliver speeches and they were all

00:20:15 ◼   ► laughing.

00:20:16 ◼   ► Pete: Huh.

00:20:17 ◼   ► Pete; Because Reagan was a perfect melody, in his description at least, of being able

00:20:19 ◼   ► to lie effectively in some combination, but if you could cut out either the meaning or

00:20:27 ◼   ► the emotional part, it was transparent.

00:20:29 ◼   ► And I have that feeling sometimes,

00:20:30 ◼   ► if you took somebody who hadn't watched TV,

00:20:33 ◼   ► you know, a bit out of culture,

00:20:34 ◼   ► they were often in some remote place,

00:20:36 ◼   ► they come back 25 years later and they watch reality TV

00:20:38 ◼   ► and say, "Why does everyone watch these fake things?

00:20:40 ◼   ► "These are made for TV movies, right?"

00:20:42 ◼   ► You're like, "No, no, this is supposed to be real."

00:20:43 ◼   ► And they'd say, "But it's so fake!"

00:20:45 ◼   ► You know, and we've become conditioned

00:20:47 ◼   ► to what we believe reality is supposed to be

00:20:49 ◼   ► as portrayed in those,

00:20:50 ◼   ► and we accept it more fully as reality.

00:20:53 ◼   ► Everything is worldwide wrestling foundation,

00:20:56 ◼   ► whatever it's called. It's all wrestling.

00:20:59 ◼   ► - Horrible people.

00:21:00 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:21:02 ◼   ► Acting horribly.

00:21:03 ◼   ► Right, I always think back, and the first thought I had

00:21:06 ◼   ► when I saw that tweet, and if you're,

00:21:08 ◼   ► I don't know who it was, but if, you know,

00:21:10 ◼   ► I apologize for not remembering.

00:21:12 ◼   ► That first thing I thought of was that show

00:21:18 ◼   ► that was on all the TVs in RoboCop,

00:21:22 ◼   ► where it was like that creepy, older, nebbishy guy

00:21:27 ◼   ► who was always surrounded by like really skanky models.

00:21:33 ◼   ► And no matter what happened, he had that catchphrase,

00:21:36 ◼   ► I'd buy that for a dollar.

00:21:38 ◼   ► - It's the best thing.

00:21:40 ◼   ► And you know, that dates back to the Corn Bluth story,

00:21:44 ◼   ► The Marching Morons.

00:21:45 ◼   ► Great science fiction story you can find online

00:21:47 ◼   ► from the 1950s.

00:21:48 ◼   ► The phrase there was, would you pay a quarter for that?

00:21:51 ◼   ► It was an homage to that.

00:21:53 ◼   ► In that story, an ad guy convinces

00:21:56 ◼   ► the supposedly stupidest people in society

00:21:59 ◼   ► to board rocket ships that land on the sun.

00:22:02 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:22:03 ◼   ► That go straight to the sun.

00:22:04 ◼   ► To get rid of all the excess population of idiots.

00:22:06 ◼   ► That's kind of a 1950s idea.

00:22:08 ◼   ► It's a fascinating story.

00:22:09 ◼   ► - I also thought of the old Stephen King,

00:22:13 ◼   ► I think it was a novella.

00:22:14 ◼   ► I think it was one of the ones he wrote under a pseudonym.

00:22:17 ◼   ► Richard Bachman. - Richard Bachman, yeah.

00:22:19 ◼   ► - The Running Man.

00:22:20 ◼   ► Which they turned into a Schwarzenegger movie, but sort of--

00:22:23 ◼   ► - Crazy film.

00:22:24 ◼   ► - The novella was a lot less Schwarzenegger-y

00:22:27 ◼   ► in a little bit, but it was really kind of spot on

00:22:30 ◼   ► about where TV's going, you know,

00:22:32 ◼   ► that it is sort of feeding.

00:22:35 ◼   ► Now, you know, obviously the king twist

00:22:38 ◼   ► was that they were actually trying to kill the protagonists,

00:22:41 ◼   ► and that is not going to happen.

00:22:43 ◼   ► But it does--

00:22:47 ◼   ► - I watched the season of Survivor

00:22:48 ◼   ► which they put people with no clean water supply and brain eating parasites on the island.

00:22:52 ◼   ► So you know, nobody died, but—

00:22:54 ◼   ► Pete: Close, right?

00:22:55 ◼   ► Alan: Yeah, I mean, that was a scenario.

00:22:56 ◼   ► People were doing—

00:22:57 ◼   ► Pete; Right, right.

00:22:58 ◼   ► They did have a medical crew nearby for anybody who came down with dysentery.

00:23:00 ◼   ► Alan; Well, it's true, but brain eating parasites, I mean, that's, you know, you're

00:23:02 ◼   ► pushing the limit there a little.

00:23:04 ◼   ► Pete; But it does sort of feed into, you know, the sort of dark side of our psyche that led

00:23:13 ◼   ► to, you know, the Roman Colosseum, right?

00:23:16 ◼   ► Where you know—

00:23:17 ◼   ► You know as long as you can brand the people as some sort of other

00:23:21 ◼   ► You know watching them destroy their lives you can take solace, you know, you take pleasure in it, right? Well, they're just

00:23:29 ◼   ► You know trashy housewives from Beverly Hills. So, you know watching, you know, one of them, you know

00:23:37 ◼   ► Drink herself into rehab on TV in front of the whole nation

00:23:44 ◼   ► somehow you take pleasure in it,

00:23:46 ◼   ► or at least you're supposed to.

00:23:48 ◼   ► - Sick fascination gets ratings and it gets page views.

00:23:52 ◼   ► And we are denying something about ourselves

00:23:55 ◼   ► as a society or humanity if we don't accept that.

00:23:59 ◼   ► But pandering to it,

00:24:01 ◼   ► we don't have to agree to pander to it.

00:24:02 ◼   ► And I think that's been that divide in culture

00:24:04 ◼   ► between highbrow and lowbrow,

00:24:05 ◼   ► is highbrow is we're not gonna pander.

00:24:07 ◼   ► You all, lowbrow people,

00:24:08 ◼   ► should lift yourself up to our level

00:24:11 ◼   ► so that you can appreciate this fine culture

00:24:13 ◼   ► that's actually what you should be watching.

00:24:14 ◼   ► And lowbrow is, look, we're just enjoying this stuff.

00:24:18 ◼   ► It's not serious, get off your high horse.

00:24:21 ◼   ► But the gap seems to get bigger and bigger for people

00:24:23 ◼   ► and people who feel like there's a cultural loss.

00:24:26 ◼   ► I mean, people are saying, you know,

00:24:27 ◼   ► that you can look at people writing in the 17th century

00:24:30 ◼   ► about terrible popular music and entertainment

00:24:32 ◼   ► and only the good stuff you could find in the salons

00:24:34 ◼   ► and those idiots in the streets are morons.

00:24:37 ◼   ► And I'm sure you can find it in Roman times and before,

00:24:40 ◼   ► like whenever there was culture, there was a divide.

00:24:42 ◼   ► but it somehow seems more obvious to us now

00:24:44 ◼   ► because it's so exposed.

00:24:45 ◼   ► We can all see and find the worst stuff

00:24:48 ◼   ► and see exactly how many people are obsessed by

00:24:52 ◼   ► and reading the worst stuff,

00:24:53 ◼   ► which we used to not be able to,

00:24:54 ◼   ► we didn't have to know that as much.

00:24:56 ◼   ► I mean, 'cause there were tabloids,

00:24:57 ◼   ► people read, you know,

00:24:58 ◼   ► the New York Daily News still exists

00:24:59 ◼   ► and all those are out there.

00:25:01 ◼   ► And that used to be the battle

00:25:01 ◼   ► between the New York Times and the tabloid papers.

00:25:04 ◼   ► So it's just more obvious and more people we know

00:25:09 ◼   ► that we wouldn't think would spread it

00:25:10 ◼   ► are passing on this stuff too, so it gets in our face.

00:25:13 ◼   ► - Well, compared to something like Buzzfeed,

00:25:15 ◼   ► even though Buzzfeed occasionally has really good features,

00:25:18 ◼   ► they had a really good feature I read about

00:25:20 ◼   ► a young man from Utah who disappeared in China

00:25:28 ◼   ► at the end of his mission and his family

00:25:30 ◼   ► has spent the last few years trying to figure out

00:25:31 ◼   ► what happened to him and their best guess,

00:25:33 ◼   ► and they really have some pretty, nothing confirming it,

00:25:37 ◼   ► but some pretty good circumstantial evidence

00:25:39 ◼   ► he might have been kidnapped by North Korean secret agents and taken to North Korea.

00:25:43 ◼   ► Pete: Oh my god. Unplausible, sadly, yeah.

00:25:45 ◼   ► Ted, in a way. At BuzzFeed, you know, which, you know, it's not their bread and butter,

00:25:50 ◼   ► you know, but they're, they are paying for some feature writing.

00:25:53 ◼   ► Pete Yeah, everybody is –

00:25:55 ◼   ► Ted But compared to, compared to most of what

00:25:57 ◼   ► BuzzFeed publishes though, something like the New York Post and the New York Daily News is

00:26:01 ◼   ► relatively highbrow today.

00:26:03 ◼   ► Pete Yeah, the, it, right, and the, well,

00:26:05 ◼   ► the, this is, here's the interesting trend, the long form journalism trend is that

00:26:08 ◼   ► A lot of sites that do, they make it up in volume.

00:26:12 ◼   ► So Buzzfeed, it's the same thing with Huffington Post to some extent, or political, I don't

00:26:18 ◼   ► want to argue political is different, but you need a business insider probably in this

00:26:22 ◼   ► camp too, is they need billions of very, very, very low paying page views to have enough

00:26:28 ◼   ► money to then afford to do stuff that will get higher ad rates because it's higher quality,

00:26:34 ◼   ► but requires more of an investment.

00:26:35 ◼   ► And BuzzFeed certainly, they've got this huge war chest of private investment and they

00:26:40 ◼   ► certainly have been perfecting the bulk model and they've been hiring more and more serious

00:26:46 ◼   ► journalists at the sort of top end of news reporting and long form end and are doing

00:26:51 ◼   ► good work there.

00:26:53 ◼   ► Much as I hate to say it, they're doing good work there.

00:26:55 ◼   ► And I think, you know, Digg actually is producing features now.

00:26:59 ◼   ► That's new.

00:27:00 ◼   ► Like, all the sites out there that produce any kind of volume are also now trying to

00:27:05 ◼   ► do long-form work? Well, let's get back to that. I'm going to take a break right now

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00:30:01 ◼   ► So anyway, I started the show talking about the balls you have up in here.

00:30:05 ◼   ► We only got to the magazine.

00:30:06 ◼   ► You're also still writing for speaking a magazine to the economist and talk about doing it the

00:30:13 ◼   ► right way and shooting for top-tier journalism and analysis. You've got your podcast, The

00:30:24 ◼   ► New Disruptors. Is that weekly? You do that every week?

00:30:27 ◼   ► Every week. I tape ahead, so it's slightly non-perishable, so I sometimes do batches

00:30:34 ◼   ► at a time, but just celebrated a year. This is a year of episodes. I skipped one episode,

00:30:39 ◼   ► I've done 50, episode 52 is this week on the anniversary.

00:30:43 ◼   ► All right, when we're recording this, I should say.

00:30:45 ◼   ► - Congratulations.

00:30:46 ◼   ► - Mr. Reza, thank you.

00:30:47 ◼   ► It's so much fun.

00:30:48 ◼   ► It's just, I love dealing with creative people.

00:30:50 ◼   ► Like I have this background in art, work in journalism.

00:30:54 ◼   ► I love collaborating.

00:30:55 ◼   ► I mean, my favorite thing is finding people

00:30:57 ◼   ► I like to work with and figuring out something

00:30:59 ◼   ► to do with them.

00:31:00 ◼   ► And so the podcast, like every week I get to talk to new

00:31:02 ◼   ► and interesting people who are just,

00:31:05 ◼   ► I keep trying to find, you know, I'm not a Pollyanna,

00:31:06 ◼   ► but I like people who are excited and happy

00:31:08 ◼   ► about what they do.

00:31:09 ◼   ► And that's kind of my Twitter problem too,

00:31:11 ◼   ► is people who are sad sacks, I tend to unfollow.

00:31:13 ◼   ► Like even if they're people I otherwise like,

00:31:15 ◼   ► like I don't want relentless negativity.

00:31:16 ◼   ► I don't need relentless positivity either.

00:31:19 ◼   ► But so the podcast, I find people who have just,

00:31:23 ◼   ► are just full of this incredible creativity

00:31:26 ◼   ► and enthusiasm and just engaged with life.

00:31:29 ◼   ► And then sometimes it's, you know,

00:31:31 ◼   ► really off-base stuff.

00:31:32 ◼   ► And sometimes it's like, you know,

00:31:33 ◼   ► these people are making a book or they have a business,

00:31:36 ◼   ► they do whatever, but it's just, it's so much fun.

00:31:38 ◼   ► - All right, I'm on your Twitter page, Glenn F with two N's.

00:31:43 ◼   ► - That's me.

00:31:46 ◼   ► - It says right now, just on your profile page,

00:31:51 ◼   ► 180,091 tweets.

00:31:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's a little crazy, isn't it?

00:31:57 ◼   ► I've been on for, you know,

00:31:58 ◼   ► that's only 40,000 tweets a year or something.

00:32:01 ◼   ► I talk to people though,

00:32:04 ◼   ► Twitter is not optimized for @mentions,

00:32:06 ◼   ► So I will get blocked on Twitter during active things going on, and 95% of what I'm tweeting

00:32:12 ◼   ► is not, you know, quote unquote public.

00:32:14 ◼   ► It starts with an @ sign, so only people following me and the other person see it.

00:32:18 ◼   ► So I think of it as having a conversation, and Twitter counts that against you.

00:32:22 ◼   ► So I'll be going back and forth with someone, you know, quasi-publicly, but nobody on my,

00:32:28 ◼   ► none of my followers see it unless they happen to intersect with that other person.

00:32:31 ◼   ► So for some people, I'm being very talky.

00:32:34 ◼   ► You know, if you and I have a similar graph, then I'm very talky if we're going back

00:32:37 ◼   ► and forth, but to everybody else, they don't see it at all unless they've got, you know,

00:32:40 ◼   ► configured whatever.

00:32:42 ◼   ► So it's weird.

00:32:43 ◼   ► So in some ways, I'm really prolific.

00:32:44 ◼   ► Other ways, it's like, well, this is my chat tool.

00:32:46 ◼   ► This is my public chat thing.

00:32:49 ◼   ► So, let me ask you this.

00:32:53 ◼   ► With the magazine, the magazine is still completely funded by subscriptions.

00:32:58 ◼   ► Is that correct?

00:32:59 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:33:00 ◼   ► - I think, well, let's see, I have to put a proviso in

00:33:03 ◼   ► because we've started doing some work with Medium,

00:33:06 ◼   ► Medium.com, because they are doing their own experiments

00:33:10 ◼   ► with what people are gonna pay for for content

00:33:12 ◼   ► or look at for content.

00:33:14 ◼   ► So they're paying some publishers, including me,

00:33:16 ◼   ► to develop some new content that appears

00:33:19 ◼   ► exclusively there first.

00:33:20 ◼   ► So it's not this wonderful giant pot of money

00:33:24 ◼   ► they're throwing at me, but so some money for the magazine

00:33:27 ◼   ► could ostensibly be said to be coming from the net

00:33:29 ◼   ► after I pay writers for that,

00:33:32 ◼   ► but it's a pretty tiny amount

00:33:34 ◼   ► relative to the subscription revenue.

00:33:35 ◼   ► There's no advertising in Medium,

00:33:37 ◼   ► which is why it makes it a reasonable place to work with,

00:33:41 ◼   ► where I don't have to change the model of what I'm doing

00:33:43 ◼   ► or worry about people being irritated

00:33:45 ◼   ► by having ads in one place or another.

00:33:47 ◼   ► Sort of another publishing platform I'm trying out

00:33:49 ◼   ► and they're subsidizing that, which is kinda cool.

00:33:53 ◼   ► - Well, but if they don't have ads

00:33:54 ◼   ► and they don't charge for access,

00:33:56 ◼   ► then where are they ever gonna get money?

00:33:58 ◼   ► How is it not just burning up a pile of venture capital?

00:34:02 ◼   ► - Volume, of course.

00:34:04 ◼   ► No, that's the change bank.

00:34:05 ◼   ► Well, from what I can tell, it's funny,

00:34:08 ◼   ► they don't play it too close to the vest.

00:34:09 ◼   ► And I think Ava's talked about it in public a bit too,

00:34:13 ◼   ► is they're experimenting now.

00:34:15 ◼   ► I mean, this is kind of the Twitter model,

00:34:17 ◼   ► is Twitter, what was it, five years

00:34:19 ◼   ► before they ever started doing advertising

00:34:21 ◼   ► or doing anything to do with money.

00:34:23 ◼   ► And these are the same folks behind that, essentially.

00:34:28 ◼   ► It's some of the same folks and they're funding it,

00:34:31 ◼   ► I think, as a, hey, we don't know what's gonna happen next.

00:34:33 ◼   ► Nobody does.

00:34:34 ◼   ► This is the time to noodle

00:34:35 ◼   ► and we're gonna blow some money on noodling,

00:34:37 ◼   ► but they're trying to noodle

00:34:38 ◼   ► on the high end of the spectrum,

00:34:41 ◼   ► which is, you know, it's another one

00:34:41 ◼   ► of those great for readers things,

00:34:43 ◼   ► how it works out for publications and investors,

00:34:46 ◼   ► you know, to be determined,

00:34:47 ◼   ► but they're paying for content internally.

00:34:50 ◼   ► I mean, they made a blogging platform.

00:34:51 ◼   ► So this is the thing that's confusing right now

00:34:53 ◼   ► is Medium used to be one thing when it launched.

00:34:55 ◼   ► It was like a place where people who were invited

00:34:57 ◼   ► could use a new, essentially blogging platform

00:35:00 ◼   ► that has a really great editor, editing interface,

00:35:04 ◼   ► to post essays and stuff, right?

00:35:06 ◼   ► That was what it launched as.

00:35:07 ◼   ► And you had to be invited, and it was a little rudimentary,

00:35:09 ◼   ► but it was a very attractive way to write and read.

00:35:12 ◼   ► Then it became, well, more people are being invited.

00:35:14 ◼   ► Then it became anyone now can go sign up with Twitter,

00:35:17 ◼   ► or via Twitter account, authenticate themselves,

00:35:20 ◼   ► and post whatever they want in Medium.

00:35:22 ◼   ► And so it's a blogging platform, right?

00:35:23 ◼   ► And you can export all your stuff

00:35:25 ◼   ► in a format you can bring somewhere else,

00:35:26 ◼   ► but you know, you own your words,

00:35:28 ◼   ► they have a non-exclusive license, no ads.

00:35:31 ◼   ► But now it's expanded, as several months ago

00:35:33 ◼   ► they started hiring editors and they have,

00:35:36 ◼   ► they assign out articles.

00:35:38 ◼   ► They hired my friend Matt Bors, editorial cartoonist,

00:35:41 ◼   ► is their kind of on-staff guy,

00:35:44 ◼   ► and he runs all his stuff first there,

00:35:45 ◼   ► he's doing original work for them,

00:35:46 ◼   ► and he's contracting people like Rich Stevens

00:35:49 ◼   ► and Tom Tomorrow and so forth to do original

00:35:52 ◼   ► and reprint work on the site.

00:35:54 ◼   ► So now they're an editorial operation

00:35:55 ◼   ► that's doing cartoons and long form journalism

00:35:58 ◼   ► and other stuff and with editors.

00:35:59 ◼   ► And then the third thing is what they're doing with me

00:36:02 ◼   ► and a few other publications,

00:36:04 ◼   ► where they're subsidizing content in the interest of us

00:36:07 ◼   ► creating new high quality stuff that meets, you know,

00:36:10 ◼   ► good stringent editorial requirements,

00:36:12 ◼   ► but they don't have to pay for our editorial operations.

00:36:15 ◼   ► They don't have to build them themselves.

00:36:16 ◼   ► They're just paying us a fee and we're posting stuff

00:36:19 ◼   ► and we're seeing what happens.

00:36:22 ◼   ► So I think it's a great multi-tier experiment

00:36:24 ◼   ► and they keep improving the editing experience.

00:36:27 ◼   ► You, like I, have worked with a lot of

00:36:29 ◼   ► content management systems or CMSs over the year,

00:36:32 ◼   ► and they're all awful,

00:36:33 ◼   ► and Medium is the best CMS I've ever worked with.

00:36:36 ◼   ► It's not very flexible in that you're sort of like Apple.

00:36:39 ◼   ► Like, Medium and Apple have a lot in common.

00:36:42 ◼   ► You don't have a lot of choices,

00:36:43 ◼   ► but the choices are generally good.

00:36:45 ◼   ► If you don't like 'em, you're stuck,

00:36:47 ◼   ► but you generally like 'em.

00:36:49 ◼   ► So like, remember how Keynote, when it launched,

00:36:51 ◼   ► there were very few things you could do in Keynote,

00:36:53 ◼   ► But it was hard to make a bad presentation in Keynote,

00:36:55 ◼   ► like a truly ugly PowerPoint presentation.

00:36:58 ◼   ► The default setting in PowerPoint is ugly and bad.

00:37:00 ◼   ► The default setting in Keynote is attractive and reasonable.

00:37:04 ◼   ► It's still hard to communicate.

00:37:05 ◼   ► You have to work in Keynote to communicate

00:37:07 ◼   ► like you do anywhere.

00:37:08 ◼   ► So Medium's default is very nicely presented,

00:37:11 ◼   ► very straightforward, minimal formatting,

00:37:13 ◼   ► and it's a delightful,

00:37:15 ◼   ► distraction-free place to write as well.

00:37:17 ◼   ► So as a writer, I don't like writing in crazy environments.

00:37:20 ◼   ► I write in BB Edit, mostly.

00:37:22 ◼   ► And Medium is the closest thing to writing

00:37:24 ◼   ► and kind of a stripped down editor as you can get,

00:37:26 ◼   ► but you can throw images in, you can do limited formatting.

00:37:28 ◼   ► So that's kind of the thing is they've built

00:37:30 ◼   ► a really great CMS in which the backend writing

00:37:34 ◼   ► and administration is very, very, very close

00:37:37 ◼   ► to what the front end is.

00:37:38 ◼   ► Like when you switch from editing to publishing,

00:37:40 ◼   ► the difference is really tiny and that's kind of awesome.

00:37:43 ◼   ► It's very WYSIWYG and it's very direct

00:37:46 ◼   ► and that is huge in its own self.

00:37:48 ◼   ► And then they're trying all these models

00:37:49 ◼   ► to see what gets people to read.

00:37:52 ◼   ► And then I assume at some point, you know,

00:37:53 ◼   ► they will figure out what it is.

00:37:55 ◼   ► Do they put ads on like the decks

00:37:57 ◼   ► that are really unobtrusive but effective,

00:37:59 ◼   ► but don't feel like crazy banner advertising?

00:38:02 ◼   ► Or do they go to a subscription model or do they,

00:38:04 ◼   ► I don't know what they do, but I'm glad

00:38:06 ◼   ► that they're pouring some real money in

00:38:08 ◼   ► 'cause newspapers aren't.

00:38:09 ◼   ► None of the conventional journalism sources

00:38:12 ◼   ► are really experimenting in this radical way

00:38:15 ◼   ► with what the future of a reading experience is.

00:38:17 ◼   ► I mean, this is almost a natural outgrowth

00:38:19 ◼   ► of what Marco's ideas have been with Instapaper

00:38:21 ◼   ► and with other Read It Later services about,

00:38:24 ◼   ► you know, what do people wanna read online?

00:38:26 ◼   ► They don't want cruft, they don't want nonsense,

00:38:27 ◼   ► and Medium is that.

00:38:28 ◼   ► It's no cruft, no ads, and very, very straightforward

00:38:31 ◼   ► reading in every platform.

00:38:33 ◼   ► - Right, and you're gonna lose, everybody's gonna lose

00:38:36 ◼   ► if your idea is what does everybody wanna read online?

00:38:39 ◼   ► What can we make that everybody is gonna wanna read?

00:38:42 ◼   ► 'Cause no, you're not gonna do it.

00:38:43 ◼   ► And if you want to say, well, what is,

00:38:47 ◼   ► Most, what are most people gonna wanna read?

00:38:49 ◼   ► Well, then you're gonna end up

00:38:50 ◼   ► with some crap like Buzzfeed, right?

00:38:52 ◼   ► But what are, what is an untapped or under,

00:38:56 ◼   ► underserved market for what some people want to read online?

00:39:03 ◼   ► Right, and that's, you know, how about, you know, good stuff?

00:39:07 ◼   ► - It's like, what would a New Yorker be like

00:39:09 ◼   ► if the New Yorker didn't have its legacy

00:39:11 ◼   ► but had the same quality of writing?

00:39:13 ◼   ► I mean, I don't wanna promote Medium as being the New Yorker

00:39:16 ◼   ► but they're more on that end of things,

00:39:19 ◼   ► and people will pay, The New Yorker has not really ever

00:39:21 ◼   ► been a very profitable publication.

00:39:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, I've heard that.

00:39:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, on its own it wasn't,

00:39:25 ◼   ► and then Condé Nast has subsidized

00:39:27 ◼   ► in different ways for years.

00:39:28 ◼   ► I think it actually has made money for a while,

00:39:31 ◼   ► partly because probably reducing expenses

00:39:33 ◼   ► like everybody else, but The New Yorker is not

00:39:37 ◼   ► like this great engine.

00:39:39 ◼   ► Newspapers used to make 25 to 35% profit,

00:39:41 ◼   ► we talked about it the last time I was on.

00:39:42 ◼   ► I mean, these huge profit margins,

00:39:44 ◼   ► The New Yorker has probably made 1% profit

00:39:46 ◼   ► over its 100 or 90 years in existence.

00:39:50 ◼   ► So that hearkens back to what I was saying in the beginning

00:39:52 ◼   ► that like you don't do really great,

00:39:55 ◼   ► most of the time really great journalism,

00:39:58 ◼   ► really interesting stuff that you read

00:40:00 ◼   ► is not massively profitable,

00:40:01 ◼   ► but it should pay everyone involved.

00:40:03 ◼   ► So the New Yorker may not return money to investors,

00:40:06 ◼   ► but everyone involved in it gets that reporters

00:40:08 ◼   ► get paid well, the staff, the editors.

00:40:11 ◼   ► - What did you say?

00:40:11 ◼   ► It's like the heritage of the New Yorker.

00:40:13 ◼   ► what did you just say?

00:40:14 ◼   ► The, the, the, the, something about like the, the, I forget how you said it, but it was

00:40:20 ◼   ► perfect. It was the way that the New Yorker has such a great legacy. I don't know. What

00:40:24 ◼   ► did you say?

00:40:25 ◼   ► I don't even know. That's like, we need to go to the top.

00:40:28 ◼   ► Something about how they build on that and that it exists, you know, and that they're,

00:40:31 ◼   ► you know, the New Yorker still looks like the New Yorker.

00:40:34 ◼   ► Oh yeah, yeah. And I mean, that's the thing is they are doing what they call digital replica

00:40:37 ◼   ► publishing. And this, you know, this gets us into a different issue is what I know I'll

00:40:42 ◼   ► back to the, you know, is the magazine, you know, so about 97 or 98% of the funding is,

00:40:48 ◼   ► or of our, you know, net revenue is coming from subscriptions or it comes from some subscriptions.

00:40:53 ◼   ► And there's, we're in a very interesting position. I bring up the New Yorker because,

00:40:59 ◼   ► and this gets us into the whole newsstand, Apple newsstand thing, is that the New Yorker and a lot

00:41:07 ◼   ► of other publications because of how newspaper and magazine auditing is done for circulation,

00:41:14 ◼   ► they do a digital replica, which is the kind of Adobe or other bloated interface, right?

00:41:20 ◼   ► And that's, again, that's what brought Marco into making the magazine.

00:41:22 ◼   ► The first place was 780 megabyte downloads of The New Yorker for an issue on the iPad.

00:41:27 ◼   ► And you're like, what?

00:41:28 ◼   ► God's name needs 800 megabytes.

00:41:30 ◼   ► But they have to produce something that's very similar in form to the print issue to

00:41:34 ◼   ► get auditing, get the advertising.

00:41:35 ◼   ► that's their model, even though they're selling subscriptions digital only.

00:41:38 ◼   ► So, uh, in GigaOM a couple months ago,

00:41:41 ◼   ► they put this report in which they showed some of the numbers from the audited

00:41:45 ◼   ► circulation, the digital replica and print circulation of various publications,

00:41:50 ◼   ► including, you know, the top ones, New Yorker and so forth.

00:41:53 ◼   ► And it turns out they don't have very many subscriptions. I mean,

00:41:56 ◼   ► the New Yorker,

00:41:56 ◼   ► I think has a million print subscriptions and a hundred thousand digital only,

00:42:00 ◼   ► you know, replica subscriptions. And that's not a lot. And you know,

00:42:04 ◼   ► most of those probably don't come from the newsstand. They come from the New Yorkers

00:42:07 ◼   ► website or they could come from another app.

00:42:09 ◼   ► So...

00:42:10 ◼   ► Yeah, mine do, yeah. Because I was already a print subscriber.

00:42:12 ◼   ► Yeah, and you get a free, right, if you're a print subscriber, a lot of publications,

00:42:16 ◼   ► you're not going to the newsstand to subscribe. So, Apple had started the newsstand conceivably

00:42:20 ◼   ► as a way to take some of the really huge amounts of money spent on periodicals, bring it in

00:42:25 ◼   ► house there, take their 30% cut, and save the periodical industry because they were

00:42:31 ◼   ► are going to make it easy for people to subscribe,

00:42:34 ◼   ► lost subscribers would come back,

00:42:36 ◼   ► marketing would be cheaper and it would be worth 30%

00:42:38 ◼   ► because Apple was handling all of this

00:42:41 ◼   ► and it was a much stickier experience and blah, blah, blah.

00:42:43 ◼   ► And that's obviously turned out not to be true.

00:42:45 ◼   ► I think it's clear that Apple is not the savior

00:42:47 ◼   ► of the book industry or the periodical industry

00:42:50 ◼   ► and it's led to sort of where they are today with Newsstand.

00:42:55 ◼   ► The magazine is actually one of the more popular

00:42:58 ◼   ► publications and we shouldn't be on Newsstand.

00:43:00 ◼   ► And we show up in the top grossing list,

00:43:03 ◼   ► sometimes very close to the top.

00:43:04 ◼   ► And we should not, if the other publications were doing

00:43:07 ◼   ► as well as they should in selling on Newsstand

00:43:10 ◼   ► as their primary place for their digital subscriptions

00:43:13 ◼   ► to be purchased.

00:43:14 ◼   ► - I still think, and I think this is one of those like,

00:43:18 ◼   ► sort of, it's meta analysis,

00:43:21 ◼   ► but I think it's sort of underrepresented,

00:43:24 ◼   ► is on the day the original iPad was introduced

00:43:28 ◼   ► at that event.

00:43:29 ◼   ► And it kind of garnered a, at least in some quarters,

00:43:35 ◼   ► especially in the more mainstream.

00:43:37 ◼   ► I think that, you know, I certainly got it.

00:43:39 ◼   ► I really was impressed by the original iPad.

00:43:43 ◼   ► And I think a lot of other tech sort of public,

00:43:48 ◼   ► or at least like the people who get what Apple does

00:43:51 ◼   ► were very impressed right off the bat.

00:43:52 ◼   ► But the collective response in the mainstream media

00:43:56 ◼   ► was a sort of meh.

00:43:58 ◼   ► It's just a big eye for you.

00:44:00 ◼   ► But a big part of that was definitely

00:44:04 ◼   ► because leading up to the announcement,

00:44:08 ◼   ► when everybody knew it was gonna be a tablet, right?

00:44:10 ◼   ► There was, you know, for months in advance,

00:44:12 ◼   ► there was Apple's working on a tablet.

00:44:13 ◼   ► They're working on a tablet.

00:44:14 ◼   ► And then the day, you know, before the event,

00:44:16 ◼   ► everybody knew or thought they knew.

00:44:19 ◼   ► Everybody was pretty darn sure

00:44:20 ◼   ► that what this event was for was for this tablet.

00:44:24 ◼   ► They were gonna introduce a tablet.

00:44:27 ◼   ► But part of that was that it was also widely predicted that the tablet was going to save

00:44:35 ◼   ► the publishing industry, save the newspaper and magazine issue.

00:44:39 ◼   ► It was going to do for newspapers and magazines what the iPod did for music.

00:44:45 ◼   ► And I know that in hindsight, lots and lots of music executives still say they still think

00:44:49 ◼   ► that they would have been better off without it because the revenues are still lower than

00:44:54 ◼   ► they were at the peak of the CD era.

00:44:57 ◼   ► But that, you know, I think rational analysis will tell you that the CD era was an anomaly

00:45:03 ◼   ► because they, you know, right up until Napster, they were charging people 17, $18 for a hit

00:45:10 ◼   ► CD and people were buying them just to get like the two songs that they wanted on it.

00:45:14 ◼   ► Oh, well, there's also CDs were repurchasing.

00:45:17 ◼   ► Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.

00:45:18 ◼   ► So you had that bubble when people, all the scratchy LPs were thrown out and they're like,

00:45:22 ◼   ► I'm getting this.

00:45:23 ◼   ► You know for me, you know, like I'm young enough there where my original music collection was cassette tapes

00:45:28 ◼   ► And I bought rebought a lot of stuff on CD. Yes

00:45:30 ◼   ► You know, I remember you know for me and this is totally true I remember thinking this you know when I was in college a

00:45:40 ◼   ► significant

00:45:42 ◼   ► Part of my net worth was my CDs and I didn't have a huge CD collection. I had I don't know maybe I

00:45:49 ◼   ► I don't know, 100 to 200.

00:45:51 ◼   ► I would just estimate I had somewhere between 100 and 200 compact discs.

00:45:55 ◼   ► But you could resell them, right?

00:45:57 ◼   ► You could – there were – there was a huge thing in the '90s where you go to a used

00:46:01 ◼   ► CD shop.

00:46:02 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:46:03 ◼   ► And you could resell – you could sell them for roughly 10 bucks, give or take, depending

00:46:09 ◼   ► on what it was, 5 to 10 bucks if it was in good shape.

00:46:12 ◼   ► So if I had 100 CDs, I could, if I needed the money, I could go and sell them and walk

00:46:20 ◼   ► out of the store with like $1,000, $1,500, right?

00:46:23 ◼   ► And that was actually a huge amount of my net worth.

00:46:25 ◼   ► I had a checking account that my parents occasionally put some money into.

00:46:32 ◼   ► I had a MAC LC that by the time I was in my third or fourth year of college, had greatly

00:46:42 ◼   ► appreciated and valued. And I had my CDs, you know? And I had a stereo system to play

00:46:48 ◼   ► them on. That's really all I had that if I really needed money, that's all I had to sell.

00:46:54 ◼   ► But the thing that was probably worth the most by the time I graduated were the CDs,

00:46:59 ◼   ► which is crazy if you think about it. There's no rational world. In a rational world, a

00:47:03 ◼   ► 22-year-old who likes to listen to music shouldn't have to have $2,000, $3,000 tied up in their

00:47:08 ◼   ► music collection. It's ridiculous. But that's what they wanted to go back to. Anyway, music

00:47:13 ◼   ► executives today will argue, some will argue that Apple, that if it hadn't been for those

00:47:18 ◼   ► jerks at Apple, they'd have somehow come up with something that would have kept the golden

00:47:21 ◼   ► era going. But I think rational people would agree Apple did save them from a world where

00:47:26 ◼   ► everything had gone free.

00:47:28 ◼   ► And this is what we're seeing with cable TV too, is like the cable industry, the thing

00:47:32 ◼   ► that freaks them out the most is unbundling because nobody wants all those channels. Nobody

00:47:35 ◼   ► wants to pay $80 for 500 channels, they want to pay $20, $30 for like seven channels they

00:47:41 ◼   ► watch all the time.

00:47:42 ◼   ► Right. But anyway, there was this undercurrent. And I mean, it was literally, there were people

00:47:45 ◼   ► talking about it before they let us into the event. I was there, the other press people

00:47:50 ◼   ► then that was a widely talked about this. What are they going to do? I wonder if our

00:47:55 ◼   ► people who worked for newspapers and stuff were wondering, is my paper going to get involved

00:48:00 ◼   ► with this, whatever. And when the event came and finished without any kind of announcement

00:48:05 ◼   ► of anything like it. No mention of newspaper. I guess they had the New York Times app was

00:48:11 ◼   ► demoed at the event.

00:48:12 ◼   ► Darrell Bock But they were like, "Wait, it's an app, though.

00:48:15 ◼   ► It's not a thing."

00:48:16 ◼   ► Like, it's not a –

00:48:17 ◼   ► Ben Stuart And I think that fueled the mad response to

00:48:20 ◼   ► the iPad, because these, you know, from people who work at these publications who were hoping

00:48:24 ◼   ► that Apple – they kind of went into it with this perspective of, "How's Apple going

00:48:28 ◼   ► to save my publication? I'm worried about my job." And the event came and went with

00:48:33 ◼   ► no word about it.

00:48:37 ◼   ► I think it fueled that initial poor response to the iPad because they were so…and it's

00:48:43 ◼   ► only natural if you're worried about the future of your own job and your own industry.

00:48:51 ◼   ► It still is the case today if you're somebody who's…especially if you're a little bit

00:48:55 ◼   ► older and already established and you thought even just a few years ago that you had a career

00:49:03 ◼   ► for the rest of your working years,

00:49:04 ◼   ► it's not just that you're worried

00:49:07 ◼   ► that your publication's gonna go under

00:49:09 ◼   ► and you'll have to go to some other publication.

00:49:11 ◼   ► The worry is that if the industry shrivels,

00:49:14 ◼   ► there won't be anybody else to go to.

00:49:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's not irrational because there's,

00:49:19 ◼   ► I mean, this is the problem, the disruption problem

00:49:21 ◼   ► is when you have these huge changes in the economy.

00:49:24 ◼   ► In the past, I would say pre-digital,

00:49:27 ◼   ► there was still the issue of moving atoms around.

00:49:29 ◼   ► So even if you figured out a new way

00:49:31 ◼   ► make an atomic thing better.

00:49:33 ◼   ► Like this process shaves 80% of the cost off.

00:49:36 ◼   ► People were still used to paying the same.

00:49:38 ◼   ► Like you didn't suck all of the money out of the system.

00:49:41 ◼   ► What usually you did is you sucked some of the money

00:49:44 ◼   ► into a new segment of industry or new companies.

00:49:46 ◼   ► The old ones might collapse and you'd have bankruptcies

00:49:49 ◼   ► and stuff like that, but all the money didn't go away.

00:49:52 ◼   ► The publishing industry disruption is that

00:49:55 ◼   ► because I think bad decisions and bad ways of thinking

00:49:59 ◼   ► the 1990s that everything should be, this is that misreading of Stewart Brand, I hear it all the

00:50:04 ◼   ► time, is Stewart Brand said, "Information wants to be free." He was not, this is that Libris versus

00:50:09 ◼   ► Libra, or Gratis or Libra versus Freedom of Thought, right? He meant--

00:50:14 ◼   ► Pete L

00:50:14 ◼   ► He's meant-

00:50:15 ◼   ► - Frias and beer versus frias and freedom.

00:50:18 ◼   ► - Yeah, and so his statement,

00:50:19 ◼   ► if you read it more carefully in context,

00:50:22 ◼   ► was that you should be able to have accessed information,

00:50:25 ◼   ► not that you shouldn't pay for it.

00:50:27 ◼   ► I mean, of course he was advocating more availability

00:50:30 ◼   ► of information at no cost,

00:50:33 ◼   ► but also the availability of information in general.

00:50:36 ◼   ► And he was a publisher, he sold information.

00:50:38 ◼   ► He wasn't giving it away.

00:50:39 ◼   ► So I don't know why this infected things,

00:50:43 ◼   ► And I don't think it was people buying into it.

00:50:44 ◼   ► I think the publishing industry simply did not understand

00:50:47 ◼   ► the internet and thought it was a fad

00:50:48 ◼   ► because they'd gone through video text and whatever,

00:50:51 ◼   ► you know, executives going through generation.

00:50:53 ◼   ► Yeah, like all these things are like,

00:50:55 ◼   ► ah, the internet is a lot more people,

00:50:57 ◼   ► but it's ultimately, there's no money there.

00:50:58 ◼   ► No one's gonna care and it's gonna come and go.

00:51:00 ◼   ► So we'll put some time money into it.

00:51:02 ◼   ► There were people with a lot of forethought,

00:51:03 ◼   ► like Ken Doctor, who was at, I think he was at Night Ritter.

00:51:05 ◼   ► He wrote this book called "Newsonomics" a few years ago.

00:51:08 ◼   ► He was one of the voices in the wilderness,

00:51:10 ◼   ► did some smart things, but I think,

00:51:12 ◼   ► I didn't want to say he was advocating paywalls in the 1990s.

00:51:14 ◼   ► You know, it was, and it's not that we should all be paying

00:51:17 ◼   ► for all the journalism out there.

00:51:19 ◼   ► As a publisher who has a publication where I want you to pay,

00:51:21 ◼   ► I understand there are different philosophies

00:51:23 ◼   ► and ads can support some of it.

00:51:25 ◼   ► But like 95% of the money from advertising

00:51:28 ◼   ► locked up in these quasi-local monopoly publishing,

00:51:31 ◼   ► and you know, in some national publishing markets

00:51:33 ◼   ► where the only venue where advertisers could reach people

00:51:37 ◼   ► in print were through these very specific ways

00:51:39 ◼   ► that had extremely high inflated high profit methods.

00:51:43 ◼   ► That got sucked totally out

00:51:45 ◼   ► and it wasn't replaced with much, right?

00:51:47 ◼   ► Online advertising is a huge industry,

00:51:49 ◼   ► but it's so dispersed, it's so spread so thin

00:51:52 ◼   ► that even though it's many,

00:51:54 ◼   ► like tens of billions of dollars a year now,

00:51:56 ◼   ► it didn't go back to the previous high market gatekeepers,

00:52:00 ◼   ► but advertisers have found much more efficiency, right?

00:52:02 ◼   ► So the efficiency and the disbursement,

00:52:05 ◼   ► the distribution of people's attention

00:52:08 ◼   ► at the same time, just sucked so much money out.

00:52:11 ◼   ► There's no clear path for how to fund

00:52:15 ◼   ► what was funded for, you know, 100 plus years.

00:52:17 ◼   ► Like that journalism can't exist in the same form

00:52:19 ◼   ► because the advertising money just simply

00:52:22 ◼   ► isn't coming back at that intensity per reader.

00:52:27 ◼   ► And the subscription model is still developing

00:52:30 ◼   ► whether people are willing to pay enough.

00:52:31 ◼   ► And I'm an, the magazine is an ongoing experiment.

00:52:34 ◼   ► I don't think of it as a successful business.

00:52:36 ◼   ► I'll be honest, it is a very interesting thing for me to do as an entrepreneur, but I think

00:52:40 ◼   ► of it as an ongoing experiment in how people read and what they're willing to pay for,

00:52:45 ◼   ► and I feel like I'm on the front lines of the cutting edge of understanding that, because

00:52:50 ◼   ► we're trying to do something very independent that's new, that's very much of the internet

00:52:56 ◼   ► born digital, and yet we're looking to this old model of pay us something so you can read

00:53:00 ◼   ► it.

00:53:01 ◼   ► Well, and this ties, this relates right back to what we were talking about earlier in the

00:53:07 ◼   ► show where, you know, let's call it clickbait, right?

00:53:10 ◼   ► It's just empty garbage that has no lasting value but generates lots of traffic.

00:53:20 ◼   ► You know, effectively, you know, newspapers and magazines aren't, you know, even historically,

00:53:29 ◼   ► they're not innocent of that.

00:53:30 ◼   ► always some fluff right there's you know I like comics I love I used to love the

00:53:35 ◼   ► comics I used when I was a daily newspaper reader love the comics page

00:53:38 ◼   ► but let's face it it's not serious it's not what when people talk about

00:53:42 ◼   ► newspapers as serious institutions you know the comics page is not it you know

00:53:48 ◼   ► the New York Times famously you know does not have a comics page you know

00:53:54 ◼   ► there's the society pages you know a lot of newspapers have gossip columns stuff

00:53:59 ◼   ► like that. The thing is, because it was all bundled and you had to buy either

00:54:06 ◼   ► you were a subscriber who got the whole thing every day or you bought a single

00:54:10 ◼   ► copy every day, you bought the whole thing. And so the fact that expensive

00:54:15 ◼   ► investigative journalism, something where you put a team of two reporters to

00:54:20 ◼   ► investigate whether the mayor's office has been taking illegal contributions

00:54:25 ◼   ► from, you know, a construction company. You know, the sort of thing that local newspapers are really

00:54:31 ◼   ► the only institution that can uncover that sort of thing. The sports scores for the high schools. I

00:54:36 ◼   ► mean, that was a huge reason that people read newspapers at one point. Right. Right. And so,

00:54:42 ◼   ► you know, there might be a lot more people who check the scores on the sports page than who read

00:54:49 ◼   ► the, you know, the City Hall reporters daily filings but, you know, it was, you

00:54:58 ◼   ► know, it was all of a bundle and it wasn't, it didn't matter if that City

00:55:02 ◼   ► Hall reporting cost more than, you know, paying an intern to type the high

00:55:09 ◼   ► school basketball scores as they came in. You know, it was just considered part of

00:55:13 ◼   ► the institution whereas now with this page view model where you can see what's

00:55:17 ◼   ► making the money, it just, it corrupts the whole thing and steers the institution in the direction

00:55:24 ◼   ► of where the page views are coming from.

00:55:27 ◼   ► Right, and everything becomes vertical in this market, right? Is that you have the incredibly

00:55:31 ◼   ► crass page view acquiring like lowest common denominator, puree and stuff, is all one vertical.

00:55:36 ◼   ► It's all business insider for business news, it's all Huffington Post for sort of political gossip,

00:55:42 ◼   ► it's all buzzfeed for just nonsense, right? Or you know, or even the I Can Ask Hamburger,

00:55:47 ◼   ► or I Can Ask Hamburger, which has never, was never intended to pretend to be news or anything like

00:55:52 ◼   ► that. There are all these verticals for that kind of low common denominator that used to help

00:55:58 ◼   ► justify or buoy up the profits. And then there's a vertical for comics, right? There are different

00:56:06 ◼   ► comic sites, you have all these web comics artists, many of them making part or even a

00:56:11 ◼   ► very good living. It's a huge range of people there who they would previously have to be

00:56:15 ◼   ► in a paper and syndicated and most of the money would go to the newspaper and the syndicate.

00:56:19 ◼   ► They make it directly, right? So you have them too. Then you have this investigative

00:56:24 ◼   ► part, like the features part, the investigative part, the sports part, all verticals. The

00:56:28 ◼   ► trouble is the long form and investigative part doesn't really pay. Like, you can't…

00:56:34 ◼   ► So Paul Carr just sold or sort of quasi-acquired moved NSFW Corp, his publication, into Pando

00:56:44 ◼   ► Daily.

00:56:45 ◼   ► And like, you know, we all have, you and I, and we all have different feelings about Pando

00:56:47 ◼   ► Daily and it's kind of in bed with its investors in terms of like writing about companies that

00:56:52 ◼   ► funded it and whatever.

00:56:53 ◼   ► So there's, that's a whole thing.

00:56:55 ◼   ► But NSFW Corp, I subscribe to, is a very interesting and good publication and it was essentially

00:57:00 ◼   ► the investigative arm of a newspaper or magazine.

00:57:04 ◼   ► they ran these really long super in-depth features

00:57:07 ◼   ► and they paid people fairly well for it, they had a staff.

00:57:10 ◼   ► They ran through a million dollars and they could not,

00:57:12 ◼   ► I think they had several thousand subscribers by the end,

00:57:16 ◼   ► which is nothing in terms of being able

00:57:17 ◼   ► to produce the revenue you need

00:57:19 ◼   ► for the investors investing in it.

00:57:21 ◼   ► So it doesn't say that you can't,

00:57:23 ◼   ► and you know what I'm doing,

00:57:23 ◼   ► I still have a modest number of subscribers,

00:57:25 ◼   ► what I'm doing is sustainable and I'm trying to branch out

00:57:28 ◼   ► into different publishing methods

00:57:29 ◼   ► as I feel like the newsstand is not being as viable

00:57:32 ◼   ► it was, trying to do books and other things, but it's that in the past each part would subsidize

00:57:39 ◼   ► the other. And maybe you would do this incredible investigative piece and, you know, like Newsweek,

00:57:44 ◼   ► or no, Time, didn't Time have the cover story by Stephen Brill about medical bills?

00:57:48 ◼   ► Pete: Yes.

00:57:48 ◼   ► Pete; Yeah. So, Time could have sold, I don't know if this is true or not, but Time could

00:57:52 ◼   ► actually have sold a million copies on the newsstand more because this was a big, you know,

00:57:56 ◼   ► this is, that kind of thing that gets that much buzz actually used to drive newsstand sales.

00:58:02 ◼   ► They go back to the presses, they would print more copies.

00:58:05 ◼   ► So you could come out with a great newspaper story or a great magazine story and actually recoup some of the expense sometimes by selling more copies.

00:58:13 ◼   ► And there's just none of that now.

00:58:15 ◼   ► A million, 10 million extra page views might be tens of thousands of dollars.

00:58:20 ◼   ► It's not hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

00:58:22 ◼   ► So there's a mismatch now between what used to all be grouped as like one publication

00:58:28 ◼   ► and all these different verticals, each of which may not be sustainable separately, and

00:58:33 ◼   ► maybe they have to get squeezed back together.

00:58:35 ◼   ► And that's why I say like BuzzFeed has the high end, the features and stuff they're

00:58:39 ◼   ► doing, and the lowbrow, which is the, you know, the billion page view things.

00:58:43 ◼   ► They seem to be trying to tie those back together, to glue them together, to make both ends work.

00:58:48 ◼   ► Let's come back to that. I wanted to ask you a few questions about the new standard magazine.

00:58:55 ◼   ► Speaking of which, I'm going to take a break here and do an ad read, but I also absolutely, I must do an F.U.

00:59:02 ◼   ► I must do a follow-up from last week's show with Moltz where I was talking about Apple's bunny suit ad,

00:59:10 ◼   ► the one where they torched the Intel guy in a bunny suit, and I said it was for the G5.

00:59:16 ◼   ► It's not. John Siracusa very politely corrected me. It was that was from the G3 PowerMax.

00:59:26 ◼   ► The which were so far so old I'll put that I put a link to the ad in the show notes but it was

00:59:32 ◼   ► actually when Apple was still building beige boxes. It was from 1998. So I guess the candy

00:59:40 ◼   ► colored IMAX route but the equivalent industrial design PowerMax weren't yet.

00:59:48 ◼   ► It's a really old ad.

00:59:51 ◼   ► Had what's his name, Dreyfus was the narrator.

00:59:57 ◼   ► Let me take a break and tell you about another great return sponsor to the show, our friends

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01:02:44 ◼   ► So, let's try to figure out what the hell is going on with Newsstand.

01:02:51 ◼   ► I have some ideas.

01:02:55 ◼   ► So, I guess effectively Newsstand is what a lot of people, in terms of a goal, it's

01:03:02 ◼   ► what I think everybody was hoping for the first day the iPad was announced, which is

01:03:09 ◼   ► here's our, meaning Apple's, solution to how publishers can take advantage of

01:03:18 ◼   ► this platform iOS and the iTunes store where people are spending money. Right? I

01:03:27 ◼   ► mean that's the goal. It's Apple's solution to publishers who want to make money

01:03:31 ◼   ► from iOS users. Yeah and they special cased it. I mean that's kind of the

01:03:38 ◼   ► programmer's explanation, right?

01:03:39 ◼   ► Is they said, okay, you know, you still have to make an app.

01:03:42 ◼   ► We're not making a delivery format for you.

01:03:44 ◼   ► We're not like a Kindle where you make a Moby file.

01:03:47 ◼   ► - Or we're not like iBooks where you make,

01:03:50 ◼   ► you know, an EPUB file, right?

01:03:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, we're more sophisticated.

01:03:54 ◼   ► Like we want you to take advantage of this platform.

01:03:56 ◼   ► And that was, you know, I think publishers were like,

01:03:58 ◼   ► okay, you know, you're giving us a showcase

01:04:00 ◼   ► and we have to invest in this anyway.

01:04:02 ◼   ► We don't want to just publish EPUBs.

01:04:04 ◼   ► It doesn't give us control.

01:04:05 ◼   ► We want to do new things.

01:04:06 ◼   ► So it seemed like a reasonable deal.

01:04:07 ◼   ► And they were like, okay, I mean,

01:04:09 ◼   ► I think the initial deal was, and you know,

01:04:11 ◼   ► you linked to Marco Karpinen's essay a few months ago,

01:04:15 ◼   ► middle of October in iOS 7, the final straw for newsstand.

01:04:18 ◼   ► And he runs it down.

01:04:19 ◼   ► So I won't repeat everything 'cause you should read,

01:04:21 ◼   ► that's a great article everyone should read.

01:04:23 ◼   ► I took it to heart.

01:04:24 ◼   ► But there were like seven, he lists this off,

01:04:26 ◼   ► let's do seven unique behaviors that publishers were given

01:04:30 ◼   ► in the newsstand initially.

01:04:31 ◼   ► And one of them was you could change the cover of every issue.

01:04:34 ◼   ► You know, you can update your screen captures on iTunes

01:04:36 ◼   ► every issue, not just with new dot releases of an app.

01:04:39 ◼   ► You had a special place, you know,

01:04:40 ◼   ► you could download the background.

01:04:42 ◼   ► There were all these things that you could do

01:04:45 ◼   ► that were publication-oriented and like,

01:04:47 ◼   ► so that people using an iPad or iPhone

01:04:50 ◼   ► would look at the newsstand.

01:04:52 ◼   ► The newsstand was always front and center, right?

01:04:54 ◼   ► You could move the fake folder somewhere,

01:04:56 ◼   ► but you couldn't hide it inside another folder.

01:04:58 ◼   ► And it showed little tiny, tiny, tiny icons,

01:05:00 ◼   ► which in retina are not too bad, of the publication.

01:05:03 ◼   ► And the covers would change,

01:05:04 ◼   ► so you'd know if it had an issue.

01:05:05 ◼   ► had background downloads.

01:05:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, all this stuff.

01:05:08 ◼   ► - So that you could, you know,

01:05:09 ◼   ► if your publication was relatively big,

01:05:11 ◼   ► I mean, 'cause nothing's worse.

01:05:13 ◼   ► Like, let's say, you know, whatever the reason,

01:05:15 ◼   ► let's not say whether it's a good idea or bad,

01:05:16 ◼   ► but if each issue is 100 megabytes,

01:05:19 ◼   ► which is not that uncommon for some publications,

01:05:22 ◼   ► and if it's really truly photographic heavy,

01:05:26 ◼   ► maybe it has to be, but either way,

01:05:28 ◼   ► nothing is worse than saying,

01:05:29 ◼   ► "Hey, I wanna read the new copy of National Geographic,"

01:05:32 ◼   ► and you tap the thing and it says, "Wait for download."

01:05:35 ◼   ► And if you're out and about out of the house, not on WiFi,

01:05:39 ◼   ► you know, you may not even be able to get it.

01:05:41 ◼   ► Or if you do, you might risk going over, you know,

01:05:44 ◼   ► your data limit.

01:05:45 ◼   ► - So yeah, I think my suspicion is--

01:05:47 ◼   ► - So they had this thing,

01:05:48 ◼   ► so if you could download in the background,

01:05:50 ◼   ► that was a huge win.

01:05:52 ◼   ► And the only way you could do it

01:05:53 ◼   ► was to be in Newsstand for a while, or till Iowa 7.

01:05:56 ◼   ► - That's right.

01:05:57 ◼   ► So I mean, I, you know, based on the way

01:05:58 ◼   ► that Apple was talking to book publishers ahead of time,

01:06:00 ◼   ► it's clear they talked to tons of periodical publishers,

01:06:02 ◼   ► got them started, made sure that people,

01:06:04 ◼   ► their magazines were on board,

01:06:06 ◼   ► and they told them the 30% cut thing, I'm sure,

01:06:08 ◼   ► but there were plenty of stuff available for the iPad

01:06:11 ◼   ► pretty quickly from major magazines and newspapers.

01:06:15 ◼   ► And I'm sure they listened, Apple does listen.

01:06:18 ◼   ► Some people think Apple does not listen

01:06:21 ◼   ► to its customers or partners, and it listens.

01:06:23 ◼   ► It's just sort of like, you pray to God,

01:06:25 ◼   ► he doesn't always say yes, right?

01:06:26 ◼   ► He's always listening, that's the theory.

01:06:28 ◼   ► So you pray to Apple and Apple doesn't always say yes,

01:06:30 ◼   ► But the newsstand looked to me like it was a bunch of things

01:06:34 ◼   ► where they had actually listened, consulted,

01:06:36 ◼   ► and come up with something

01:06:38 ◼   ► that was intended to benefit both sides.

01:06:41 ◼   ► And my take is that it clearly has not worked out for Apple

01:06:45 ◼   ► and publishers have clearly not walked away from it,

01:06:49 ◼   ► but walked back from it in a way

01:06:51 ◼   ► that Apple is not getting the kind of return

01:06:54 ◼   ► it wants from it because Apple has not,

01:06:56 ◼   ► I would say, improved the newsstand.

01:06:58 ◼   ► It's made its utility as a specific destination worse

01:07:02 ◼   ► in Iowa 7, it's particularly bad, it's sort of ignored.

01:07:05 ◼   ► It's kind of like, let's just forget about it.

01:07:07 ◼   ► - And it's widely complained about.

01:07:09 ◼   ► I see it on Twitter, I see it in my email

01:07:11 ◼   ► from Daring Fireball readers,

01:07:12 ◼   ► widely complained about that, you know,

01:07:15 ◼   ► is something that you can't hide, you know,

01:07:17 ◼   ► that there's an awful lot of people

01:07:19 ◼   ► who don't have anything in their newsstand.

01:07:23 ◼   ► and just, and, you know, I don't wanna say

01:07:28 ◼   ► obsessive compulsive, but just, you know, fussy enough.

01:07:31 ◼   ► You know, there's nothing wrong with that,

01:07:33 ◼   ► being fussy and wanting to have

01:07:34 ◼   ► your home screens arranged just so, right?

01:07:37 ◼   ► That's sort of the mindset that attracts people to iOS

01:07:40 ◼   ► in the first place, that you care about details.

01:07:43 ◼   ► So yeah, I've got at the end, you know,

01:07:45 ◼   ► my first two home screens are organized

01:07:47 ◼   ► just the way I want them, and then pretty much screens

01:07:49 ◼   ► two through whatever, or three through for whatever,

01:07:52 ◼   ► are just a junk drawer of apps that I search for

01:07:55 ◼   ► if I need them.

01:07:56 ◼   ► But I can totally understand the mindset

01:07:58 ◼   ► of someone who just wants one or two screens

01:08:01 ◼   ► of just the things they use

01:08:02 ◼   ► and wants them organized just so.

01:08:04 ◼   ► And it just bothers these people

01:08:06 ◼   ► that you can't get rid of that newsstand icon, right?

01:08:09 ◼   ► I see more people talking about,

01:08:11 ◼   ► "I wish I could get rid of newsstand completely

01:08:13 ◼   ► "than talking about anything that's actually in newsstand,"

01:08:16 ◼   ► which is a problem, right?

01:08:17 ◼   ► - And that's the change.

01:08:18 ◼   ► I mean, iOS 7, so part of it is

01:08:20 ◼   ► you can hide the newsstand icon now.

01:08:21 ◼   ► You can't throw it away, you can't delete it

01:08:23 ◼   ► like a lot of the ups.

01:08:24 ◼   ► But iOS 7 is, the new stand was de-emphasized in importance.

01:08:28 ◼   ► You can put it inside another folder,

01:08:30 ◼   ► you no longer see the tiny, tiny icons,

01:08:32 ◼   ► which have more of a cue for people than I realize,

01:08:34 ◼   ► based on what I hear from readers,

01:08:36 ◼   ► they forget because they don't see the tiny icon changes.

01:08:39 ◼   ► The brain is an amazing thing.

01:08:41 ◼   ► If you subscribe to publications and in iOS 6,

01:08:45 ◼   ► every time you fire it up, it's on your home screen

01:08:47 ◼   ► or maybe your second screen, but you look and you go,

01:08:49 ◼   ► oh, that's different, your brain knows.

01:08:51 ◼   ► and even though you can't even make out the detail

01:08:53 ◼   ► at 100 pixels tall, you know it's different

01:08:57 ◼   ► and you tap it or there's a blue dot or whatever.

01:08:59 ◼   ► I mean, there's some indication.

01:09:00 ◼   ► Iowa 7, that's gone.

01:09:02 ◼   ► So people interested are telling me

01:09:04 ◼   ► they don't even notice the issue's changed.

01:09:05 ◼   ► I mean, I send out Iowa 7 notifications

01:09:07 ◼   ► as do other publications, but I'm only every other week.

01:09:10 ◼   ► People lose sight of it.

01:09:12 ◼   ► And then you can hide it entirely, which is everyone's,

01:09:14 ◼   ► which is fine.

01:09:15 ◼   ► Some people wanna do that.

01:09:16 ◼   ► Apple wanted them to do that.

01:09:17 ◼   ► But it also is that thing of like

01:09:20 ◼   ► de-emphasizing its importance to Apple,

01:09:22 ◼   ► the fact that you can hide it is a user request

01:09:24 ◼   ► and it's great they're doing it

01:09:25 ◼   ► because people who don't wanna use it can hide it now,

01:09:27 ◼   ► but it also shows that it's not important enough to Apple

01:09:29 ◼   ► to irritate people by making it stay on a home screen.

01:09:32 ◼   ► - Right, so it's sort of like the converse,

01:09:34 ◼   ► like it's a problematic design on both ends

01:09:37 ◼   ► because if you don't use it,

01:09:39 ◼   ► you know, you have to do something to get rid of it

01:09:41 ◼   ► and now they've added a feature where you can't.

01:09:43 ◼   ► But then if you do, like if say the magazine

01:09:46 ◼   ► is one of your favorite apps

01:09:48 ◼   ► or if you read the New York Times app,

01:09:51 ◼   ► which is a newsstand app, every day,

01:09:52 ◼   ► if that's how you start your day every day

01:09:54 ◼   ► is reading the New York Times app,

01:09:55 ◼   ► you can't put that app icon on your home screen

01:10:00 ◼   ► or in your dock.

01:10:02 ◼   ► It has to be.

01:10:03 ◼   ► It's permanently, it's enforced that it's one level deep.

01:10:08 ◼   ► And it's even worse, in my opinion, on iOS,

01:10:11 ◼   ► because it's such a flat, conceptually,

01:10:16 ◼   ► the design is so flat.

01:10:18 ◼   ► Like it's really and it's one of the strengths. I think it's one of the reasons iOS has proven to be so popular

01:10:23 ◼   ► with the general public is

01:10:25 ◼   ► That there is no hierarchy by default

01:10:29 ◼   ► Right, or I guess there is I guess they do actually put a folder in there's like you I think they changed at some point

01:10:35 ◼   ► When now there is at least one folder like in a brand new factory fresh

01:10:39 ◼   ► iOS install but it's certainly de-emphasized and and you know

01:10:44 ◼   ► I think that's a strength of iOS because I think hierarchy is a huge problem.

01:10:49 ◼   ► Even one level of hierarchy is a huge problem for most people, because if they don't see it, it's not there.

01:10:54 ◼   ► Yeah, it's right. Out of sight, out of mind is true, and people's attention is very scarce.

01:10:59 ◼   ► They have a lot of things they can do, and once you start routinely forgetting about something

01:11:03 ◼   ► and not being reminded about it, then it's an issue. Now, you know, I understand, so I should

01:11:08 ◼   ► point out, like this, I don't want to sound like I'm bitching and moaning about like, "Oh, people

01:11:11 ◼   ► aren't subscribing to my publication, cry for me. It's more like I know we're doing good work. I

01:11:16 ◼   ► know I write for The Economist, I write for other publications, the people contributing are doing

01:11:20 ◼   ► good, or you know, write for other publications that people think of as having a high degree of

01:11:25 ◼   ► quality. I know what we're doing is good work and it's always frustrating when you're doing good

01:11:29 ◼   ► work and you feel like you can't get an audience. That is a marketing issue that is separate and

01:11:33 ◼   ► that's my own problem, right? But when I feel like the people who, so there's a difference

01:11:39 ◼   ► who I can't find and don't care about the magazine or unsubscribe because they've lost interest in the content.

01:11:44 ◼   ► That is one category, right? The category that I'm having a problem with is the people who actually like the magazine, tell me they like it, and they're emailing me to say, "You know, I'm unsubscribing because I forget it exists because in Iowa 7."

01:11:57 ◼   ► Isn't that a frustrating problem? So, bottom line, let's just spell it out. Bottom line, if you could flip a switch and turn the magazine from a newsstand app to a non-newsstand app, you would flip that switch.

01:12:08 ◼   ► Totally totally and that's the thing and I don't think a lot of people know this

01:12:12 ◼   ► You can't and I'll make that's not to say you forever and ever you won't be able to but as it stands today

01:12:17 ◼   ► You can't there is no thing you can go to in iTunes connect and say take that

01:12:23 ◼   ► You know my app the magazine which is now a new stand app and make it a regular app even though

01:12:29 ◼   ► All the things that you get from new stand you could do

01:12:34 ◼   ► You know like background downloads and stuff like yeah

01:12:37 ◼   ► There's there's a little bit of recoding us sorry because there's a couple things that are used in the newsstand as I recollect that you have

01:12:42 ◼   ► To you and clean the background download. There's a different method which I think I can use now to Marco

01:12:47 ◼   ► I was just blogging about this. I mean Marco said the same thing

01:12:49 ◼   ► He wrote a blog post at Marco org and said if I was doing it today

01:12:52 ◼   ► I wouldn't put it in the newsstand and he's and he's right

01:12:55 ◼   ► I don't fault him for it because it made perfect sense at the time of course and it got a lot of attention

01:13:00 ◼   ► being in the newsstand, but Marco Karpinen,

01:13:03 ◼   ► he wrote in his entry too, he's like,

01:13:05 ◼   ► "They are a platform," his firm,

01:13:07 ◼   ► "and they are not recommending using the newsstand."

01:13:09 ◼   ► And I believe that I could actually reformulate the app,

01:13:13 ◼   ► resubmit it, but I would lose 100% of the subscribers.

01:13:17 ◼   ► Apple does not let you transfer the subscribers.

01:13:20 ◼   ► So, I mean, the ideal case for me is that

01:13:22 ◼   ► they would let users choose, not enforce this on users,

01:13:26 ◼   ► They would let users choose to break open the newsstand

01:13:31 ◼   ► and say either don't use the newsstand,

01:13:35 ◼   ► put all the apps on my home screens

01:13:37 ◼   ► or let me drag stuff out of the newsstand

01:13:39 ◼   ► but still give me the ability to change covers.

01:13:41 ◼   ► That's the ideal thing is give me the,

01:13:44 ◼   ► I mean, Apple wanted to give publishers and users

01:13:47 ◼   ► that sense of timeliness, that this is something new,

01:13:50 ◼   ► the cover changes, that was part of the design

01:13:53 ◼   ► and it's part of the one that I think

01:13:54 ◼   ► a really appealing part of the design,

01:13:56 ◼   ► even though, outside of me and The Loop

01:13:58 ◼   ► and a few other people, a lot of publishers

01:14:00 ◼   ► just take their newsstand subscription,

01:14:01 ◼   ► again because of this digital replica issue,

01:14:04 ◼   ► and they slap it on there with type

01:14:06 ◼   ► that's in negative one point size.

01:14:07 ◼   ► So that's a very appealing thing,

01:14:10 ◼   ► being able to show a new color.

01:14:12 ◼   ► - But think about this.

01:14:13 ◼   ► I think even the name newsstand itself

01:14:17 ◼   ► shows that the metaphor's a bit broken, right?

01:14:19 ◼   ► So newsstand is where you go to--

01:14:21 ◼   ► - It's skeuomorphic.

01:14:22 ◼   ► - Right, but no, but think about it.

01:14:23 ◼   ► what is the newsstand?

01:14:24 ◼   ► The newsstand is where you go and choose

01:14:27 ◼   ► from a whole bunch of things.

01:14:29 ◼   ► And most of the stuff on the newsstand

01:14:30 ◼   ► is stuff that you've never read.

01:14:33 ◼   ► When you go to a real life newsstand,

01:14:34 ◼   ► how many of the magazines are ones

01:14:36 ◼   ► that you've never even looked at a copy of?

01:14:39 ◼   ► Most of them, right?

01:14:40 ◼   ► And there's everything from celebrity gossip,

01:14:43 ◼   ► to sports, to world affairs.

01:14:46 ◼   ► A newsstand is something like the store, right?

01:14:52 ◼   ► The newsstand metaphor should be something in iTunes, where you go to pick a magazine

01:15:00 ◼   ► to read, not a place where your magazines, the ones that you've chosen to subscribe

01:15:06 ◼   ► to show up.

01:15:08 ◼   ► In the real world, when you subscribe to two magazines and a daily newspaper, you don't

01:15:13 ◼   ► go to the newsstand to get them.

01:15:15 ◼   ► They come to your house.

01:15:17 ◼   ► They're right there.

01:15:19 ◼   ► The magazine is stuffed right through the mail slot in your door.

01:15:21 ◼   ► It should be called "The Latest" or "News" or "My Subscriptions" or something like that.

01:15:27 ◼   ► You're right, the terminology is exactly that.

01:15:29 ◼   ► Right.

01:15:29 ◼   ► I will say the most fascinating thing about the newsstand when you go to the iTunes to see what they're listing there is apparently there's a lot of market for scantily clad tattooed women in tattoo magazines.

01:15:41 ◼   ► I had no idea.

01:15:42 ◼   ► The number, the sheer quantity of different titles in that market that show up among the top grossing newsstand titles is fascinating.

01:15:50 ◼   ► I guess it's like buying romance novels. Like, guys wanna buy tattoo mags because now they're

01:15:55 ◼   ► hidden away. The other advantage though is they don't show up on your screen. So if you're trying

01:15:58 ◼   ► to buy magazines you're embarrassed about now, they show up in the newsstand and the cover is

01:16:02 ◼   ► hidden. So that's the little brown cover for the newsstand.

01:16:05 ◼   ► AC/BS But I just think that in some ways the metaphor, you really just think about it. When

01:16:11 ◼   ► you subscribe to a magazine, a real paper magazine, they do the most convenient thing that they can

01:16:18 ◼   ► possibly think to do, which is we will just mail it to you.

01:16:23 ◼   ► We'll just put it in the mail, and it will show up,

01:16:25 ◼   ► a US postal carrier will literally put it through a slot

01:16:30 ◼   ► in the door of your house, and it'll just be there for you.

01:16:33 ◼   ► And newspapers do something just ever so slightly

01:16:36 ◼   ► less convenient, but you tell a newspaper,

01:16:38 ◼   ► here, take my money and give me a copy

01:16:41 ◼   ► of your paper newspaper every day.

01:16:43 ◼   ► They say, okay, we'll take it from here,

01:16:45 ◼   ► and every day, right outside your front door

01:16:48 ◼   ► in the morning, there will be, there it'll be.

01:16:50 ◼   ► Just walk right out your front door

01:16:52 ◼   ► and there's your newspaper.

01:16:53 ◼   ► - It's on your front porch, which is your home screen,

01:16:56 ◼   ► right, is that your metaphor?

01:16:57 ◼   ► - Right, well they're just making it

01:16:58 ◼   ► the most convenient thing possible.

01:17:00 ◼   ► And it's, they're not bothering you.

01:17:03 ◼   ► These are people, you know, this is what you've asked for.

01:17:05 ◼   ► This is only after you've given them money

01:17:07 ◼   ► and said, do this, drop this off every day.

01:17:09 ◼   ► Obviously, if you didn't want the newspaper

01:17:11 ◼   ► and if you, you know, like I live in an urban area

01:17:14 ◼   ► and there's local newspapers that, you know,

01:17:16 ◼   ► that'll stuff your front door with newspapers you didn't ask for. But that's a different

01:17:22 ◼   ► case. I'm saying with these subscriptions through the iTunes store, they should make

01:17:25 ◼   ► it as convenient as possible, which to me is exactly what you said. Let it – you can

01:17:30 ◼   ► put it right on your home screen or even on your dock, the icons that you see no matter

01:17:35 ◼   ► which home screen you're on.

01:17:36 ◼   ► And I really think that that just wasn't thought through and that the name itself,

01:17:41 ◼   ► really shows just how poorly thought through the metaphor is.

01:17:46 ◼   ► - It's, yeah, I mean, it made sense at the time though.

01:17:50 ◼   ► It's like every time Apple, 'cause it was a browsing thing.

01:17:52 ◼   ► When it started, it wasn't,

01:17:54 ◼   ► it wasn't here's the stuff you wanna read.

01:17:56 ◼   ► It was like, here's your portal

01:17:58 ◼   ► to the App Store listing of publications,

01:18:01 ◼   ► and then stuff will show up here.

01:18:03 ◼   ► And now it's, you know, now it's something else.

01:18:06 ◼   ► This ties back to my contention based on the looking

01:18:10 ◼   ► looking at where I know where I am,

01:18:11 ◼   ► 'cause I know my numbers

01:18:12 ◼   ► and I can look at the top grossing lists in iTunes

01:18:16 ◼   ► for the iPhone and iPad and I can see where I sit

01:18:18 ◼   ► and I can look at those numbers

01:18:20 ◼   ► from the audited digital replica versions

01:18:23 ◼   ► that people are only subscribing to the digital version.

01:18:25 ◼   ► And I can say, as we were talking about earlier,

01:18:27 ◼   ► that people are subscribing through a website

01:18:29 ◼   ► or the print subscribers can get web stuff for free,

01:18:32 ◼   ► typically, and that's not counted

01:18:34 ◼   ► in the digital only subscriptions and the audited returns.

01:18:37 ◼   ► But I can see people are probably

01:18:38 ◼   ► subscribing through the website.

01:18:39 ◼   ► The Economist is probably not selling

01:18:41 ◼   ► most of its subscriptions through Newsstand.

01:18:43 ◼   ► They're selling them mostly through economist.com

01:18:45 ◼   ► and people have multimodal access and Android and whatever.

01:18:48 ◼   ► So I guess what that says to me is that

01:18:51 ◼   ► Apple didn't provide maybe a compelling enough front end

01:18:55 ◼   ► and as they've lost interest in it,

01:18:56 ◼   ► they've backed off more and more because Apple,

01:18:59 ◼   ► I always say this, you know, Apple eats its babies

01:19:01 ◼   ► and you may find that abhorrent

01:19:03 ◼   ► or you may find it wonderful.

01:19:04 ◼   ► It works out really well

01:19:05 ◼   ► if it's something you don't care about

01:19:06 ◼   ► and they focus their attention more on stuff that works.

01:19:09 ◼   ► it can be irritating if it's something that you like

01:19:12 ◼   ► and you're like, oh, why haven't you made iPhoto

01:19:15 ◼   ► actually good after this many years?

01:19:17 ◼   ► Like why have you lost interest in that Apple

01:19:20 ◼   ► and they don't make money off it

01:19:21 ◼   ► or it's not important to their core direction anymore.

01:19:23 ◼   ► Newsstand, in Iowa 7 showed to me that it's,

01:19:27 ◼   ► for the moment, they're pushing it off to the side,

01:19:30 ◼   ► they're not getting rid of it because what most publishers

01:19:31 ◼   ► are doing is they're making free apps

01:19:33 ◼   ► and the money for that app is coming

01:19:35 ◼   ► from outside Apple's system.

01:19:36 ◼   ► So Apple gets no benefit except in the desirability

01:19:40 ◼   ► of their platform for people downloading

01:19:43 ◼   ► and using the New York Times or New Yorker

01:19:46 ◼   ► or People or whatever app there is.

01:19:48 ◼   ► Those apps do not generate any return.

01:19:51 ◼   ► I mean, this one's a no return,

01:19:52 ◼   ► but those do not generate a substantial return for Apple,

01:19:55 ◼   ► probably in the way they conceived of it.

01:19:57 ◼   ► - Not enough to garner their attention.

01:19:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's an adjunct.

01:20:00 ◼   ► The apps are an adjunct to the entire magazine presence

01:20:03 ◼   ► for a magazine as opposed to the newsstand

01:20:06 ◼   ► the central point through which people then maybe go out and read on the web too, but

01:20:10 ◼   ► they come in through that way. And you know, that's life. So I'm not, you know, I hate to sound like

01:20:15 ◼   ► I'm bitching about like, like I'm not whining that Apple's lost focus on this. I'm more like, well,

01:20:19 ◼   ► damn, this, I thought it kind of worked okay. And it's not. So I mean, this is part of why I'm going

01:20:25 ◼   ► into all these different directions too. I've got a lot of different things going on.

01:20:27 ◼   ► Because—

01:20:27 ◼   ► But it's also true too that you're not asking a lot of Apple, right? Now, so that, that vague

01:20:33 ◼   ► idea that I talked about back in 2010 when a lot of people in newspapers and magazines

01:20:40 ◼   ► kind of had this vague notion that Apple is going to unveil some sort of boil the ocean

01:20:44 ◼   ► save the publishing industry thing was sort of thinking you know Apple is going to do

01:20:49 ◼   ► a lot of work and come up with something you know ingenious that's going to you know pump

01:20:54 ◼   ► infusal you know re-infuse money into this industry. That's hoping that Apple does a

01:20:59 ◼   ► lot. What we're talking about here is just a relatively minor

01:21:05 ◼   ► amount of attention to what's going on in newsstand. Whether it would be putting

01:21:10 ◼   ► the work in to allow a newsstand app to go non newsstand and keep it

01:21:16 ◼   ► subscribers or something like a setting in iOS that would allow a user to say

01:21:24 ◼   ► you know, use Newsstand for Newsstand apps. And then you talk, you know, on/off. And if you turn

01:21:31 ◼   ► it off, then it would say, you know, a little explanatory text, "Newsstand apps will appear

01:21:36 ◼   ► at the root level of your home screen." Pete: Exactly. And this is, you know,

01:21:39 ◼   ► I hear from readers, and again, I don't mean to sound, this is like, I'm not extolling what I do.

01:21:45 ◼   ► And you know, it's funny because I always feel like the magazine is something I inherited,

01:21:48 ◼   ► like Marco was my rich old uncle, and you know, I mean, this is a cash deal, right? We know this

01:21:52 ◼   ► is a buyout and so forth, but I didn't make the app and I love the app. And so when I

01:21:56 ◼   ► talked about it with great affection, I'm talking about Marco's work and I sort of forget

01:22:00 ◼   ► I own it sometimes. I don't think of myself as an app developer. But I do hear from, I

01:22:05 ◼   ► hear from readers regularly who say, you know, I don't really buy into the newsstand. The

01:22:08 ◼   ► only periodical app that I have that I really use is the magazine. I don't want the newsstand

01:22:12 ◼   ► icon. Can I just drag it out? And I'm like, well, if you crack it, you can. So it's, and

01:22:17 ◼   ► I hear, but I also hear that I'll see people talking on Twitter about, God damn it, I only

01:22:21 ◼   ► use the New York Times, I only use whatever. Why can't I just have that? And so the option

01:22:26 ◼   ► is now either hide your entire newsstand folder in a subfolder, which then you have to nest

01:22:32 ◼   ► into to bring up or double tap to double press to find it if you used it recently. Or, you

01:22:38 ◼   ► know, I figured out this workaround, this stupid workaround, I have a redirect. So you

01:22:42 ◼   ► can go to a web page at my site, I put it in the FAQ even, you bookmark the web page,

01:22:46 ◼   ► It's got an icon that you can make as a web app

01:22:49 ◼   ► on your home screen.

01:22:51 ◼   ► So you mark it as a bookmark on your home screen,

01:22:53 ◼   ► and then when you tap it, it loads the webpage,

01:22:55 ◼   ► does the redirect to the app, and it launches the app.

01:22:57 ◼   ► It's stupid, but it works.

01:22:58 ◼   ► It gives you an icon on your screen

01:23:00 ◼   ► that when you tap it, it launches the app.

01:23:02 ◼   ► And a number of people are like, oh, thanks for doing that.

01:23:03 ◼   ► But you know, it's like 75 people did that or something,

01:23:06 ◼   ► but I wanted to let people do it.

01:23:08 ◼   ► But it's that, at some level, it's that easy.

01:23:10 ◼   ► I realize in Apple's infrastructure,

01:23:12 ◼   ► allowing us to, as a new stand apps to come out

01:23:17 ◼   ► and like be a regular app.

01:23:19 ◼   ► And even if they disabled the cover change feature,

01:23:21 ◼   ► maybe that's not an option.

01:23:22 ◼   ► Like I'm sure there's some ugly plumbing there.

01:23:24 ◼   ► - They would definitely make the apps, if they did that,

01:23:29 ◼   ► whether you'd get to change it every issue or not,

01:23:31 ◼   ► I don't know, but you'd have to conform to that shape,

01:23:33 ◼   ► that round square shape.

01:23:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, something would be, yeah, exactly.

01:23:37 ◼   ► Something would be different 'cause they wouldn't,

01:23:38 ◼   ► Johnny Ives is not gonna allow that on the screen,

01:23:41 ◼   ► like a bunch of different shapes.

01:23:42 ◼   ► not after all the changes they made.

01:23:44 ◼   ► So I completely appreciate and understand that.

01:23:48 ◼   ► And it's not like Apple's trying to do anything to anybody,

01:23:52 ◼   ► me or the New York Times.

01:23:54 ◼   ► It's more like they didn't crack this nut.

01:23:57 ◼   ► And they're so good at cracking a lot of nuts.

01:23:58 ◼   ► And this one, they didn't crack.

01:24:00 ◼   ► And so they've kind of put it aside

01:24:02 ◼   ► and maybe they'll come back to it later

01:24:04 ◼   ► in the seventh cycle.

01:24:05 ◼   ► - Another thing that's occurred to me in this, again,

01:24:07 ◼   ► is not asking a lot of Apple would be,

01:24:09 ◼   ► perhaps the best idea would be just abandon the newsstand.

01:24:12 ◼   ► Just do an iOS 7.2, or I don't know,

01:24:17 ◼   ► we're already in,

01:24:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, it could be works.

01:24:22 ◼   ► - We're already in December, so maybe it's an iOS 8 thing.

01:24:24 ◼   ► But just get rid of it, and that's an Apple-like thing to do

01:24:27 ◼   ► don't even announce it, when they get rid of things,

01:24:30 ◼   ► they don't talk about it because it's sort of tacitly

01:24:32 ◼   ► acknowledging a mistake, just get rid of it,

01:24:35 ◼   ► and when you upgrade to iOS 7.2 or to iOS 8,

01:24:39 ◼   ► your newsstand apps are just on your home screen.

01:24:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, I'll tell you the other thing

01:24:42 ◼   ► that's interesting, of course--

01:24:43 ◼   ► - Or if you're an existing user,

01:24:44 ◼   ► or if you're an existing user,

01:24:46 ◼   ► newsstand just becomes a normal folder.

01:24:49 ◼   ► If you've got an existing installation

01:24:51 ◼   ► and then you can open it up and drag them out

01:24:53 ◼   ► and drag them back in.

01:24:54 ◼   ► So that it's still organized the way it was

01:24:56 ◼   ► before you upgraded, so there's no disorientation

01:24:58 ◼   ► of where is what happened to my icon.

01:25:01 ◼   ► But just turn it, just turn newsstand into a normal folder.

01:25:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, newsstand is the other thing

01:25:05 ◼   ► which drives people nuts, which is you can't tap on it

01:25:08 ◼   ► to get it to zoom out like you can with any folder.

01:25:11 ◼   ► So you, when you're in Newsstand,

01:25:14 ◼   ► even if you get there by a circuitous route,

01:25:17 ◼   ► like you exit, you know, you tap while you're in

01:25:19 ◼   ► a Newsstand app, you can't tap on the background

01:25:22 ◼   ► and exit the folder and go back up a level,

01:25:23 ◼   ► which I've seen so many people tweet about how,

01:25:26 ◼   ► it breaks the metaphor.

01:25:28 ◼   ► But okay, so here's the thing that Newsstand

01:25:30 ◼   ► has taught me though, or I should say

01:25:31 ◼   ► running a subscription publication has taught me

01:25:33 ◼   ► that's separate from Newsstand, but sort of tied in is,

01:25:37 ◼   ► It's very interesting after having spent

01:25:40 ◼   ► like the last 10 years on sort of writing with blogs

01:25:44 ◼   ► or daily sites or sites that update all the time,

01:25:48 ◼   ► having a cycle like this and dealing with subscribers

01:25:52 ◼   ► who get fatigued.

01:25:54 ◼   ► Like I know people get tired of reading a given site,

01:25:56 ◼   ► but it's fascinating to get email from

01:25:58 ◼   ► and talk to people who say they kind of ran out of steam.

01:26:00 ◼   ► And even when they say, I really like what you're publishing

01:26:04 ◼   ► I just don't have the time to keep up with it.

01:26:05 ◼   ► I'm like, we're doing five articles that are 1500

01:26:09 ◼   ► or 2500 words every two weeks.

01:26:11 ◼   ► And I'm like, really?

01:26:12 ◼   ► Like, and I'm a bad example

01:26:13 ◼   ► because I have very little time to read

01:26:15 ◼   ► now that I'm an editor.

01:26:16 ◼   ► I'm spending all my time editing, working with writers.

01:26:18 ◼   ► But there's definitely reader fatigue you get.

01:26:21 ◼   ► And that's kind of where the one-two punch is that

01:26:25 ◼   ► Apple sort of de-emphasizing Newsstand

01:26:27 ◼   ► makes it a little bit harder to keep existing subscribers,

01:26:31 ◼   ► makes it a little bit harder to get new ones

01:26:34 ◼   ► to deal with the churn.

01:26:35 ◼   ► 'cause there's always gonna be churn.

01:26:36 ◼   ► And so it makes the equation a little bit more difficult

01:26:39 ◼   ► for me, especially as an independent publisher,

01:26:41 ◼   ► because I don't have a website

01:26:43 ◼   ► that people are used to going to,

01:26:44 ◼   ► even though you can go to the-magazine.org

01:26:47 ◼   ► and you can get a subscription there,

01:26:48 ◼   ► you can read all the articles there.

01:26:49 ◼   ► It's a full website, has been for nine months

01:26:53 ◼   ► and people mostly don't realize that,

01:26:54 ◼   ► which is fascinating to me.

01:26:55 ◼   ► But we don't have like a website

01:26:57 ◼   ► that people are used to going to

01:26:58 ◼   ► and this is the iOS adjunct or alternative,

01:27:02 ◼   ► where for every other publication just about,

01:27:04 ◼   ► They have a website which is where the traffic's at

01:27:07 ◼   ► and this is an upgrade from the mobile version

01:27:09 ◼   ► of their site.

01:27:10 ◼   ► The app is a better thing to read in.

01:27:11 ◼   ► So that's been an interesting thing to wrestle with too.

01:27:14 ◼   ► And I mean that's why I launched the Kickstarter

01:27:15 ◼   ► is we're doing a book because I need a different modality.

01:27:19 ◼   ► I can't have everything be resting on subscriptions

01:27:21 ◼   ► because subscriptions, especially 95% of it

01:27:24 ◼   ► being an Apple site, I have probably 5% of subscribers

01:27:27 ◼   ► coming from the web.

01:27:29 ◼   ► So I need to rejigger things so that all the revenue

01:27:32 ◼   ► and in one pot to make the engine go.

01:27:35 ◼   ► - I was working towards the Kickstarter.

01:27:37 ◼   ► I wasn't gonna let it slip.

01:27:38 ◼   ► - Oh, I know, no, but it's funny.

01:27:39 ◼   ► - You've always, you've wanted a Kickstarter.

01:27:42 ◼   ► You had a, what was your Kickstarter before?

01:27:44 ◼   ► You had a Kickstarter that didn't get off the ground.

01:27:47 ◼   ► - I had an ontological Kickstarter.

01:27:49 ◼   ► It was a Kickstarter campaign to write a book

01:27:53 ◼   ► about how to run a Kickstarter campaign.

01:27:55 ◼   ► - Right.

01:27:57 ◼   ► - And the special irony is it didn't fund.

01:27:58 ◼   ► But what happened is I kinda did everything wrong.

01:28:01 ◼   ► I thought I'd studied Kickstarter enough. I'd been writing about it for a couple years.

01:28:04 ◼   ► It's a good thing then, because then your book would have been wrong.

01:28:08 ◼   ► Oh, that's right. Yeah, if I'd funded it, I don't know what I would have said in the book. But

01:28:13 ◼   ► everything good that I'm doing in my life came out of its failure, which is, you know, that's my

01:28:16 ◼   ► lemonade stand, is like lemons of a veil thing. It's like 10 days into the Kickstarter, I'm like,

01:28:21 ◼   ► "Oh, I did this all wrong. People gave me advice. I should have asked more ahead of time." It had

01:28:25 ◼   ► funded about 10%, and I'm like, "It's not gonna fund." So, I just canceled it instead of having

01:28:29 ◼   ► the ignominy of hitting the end and not reaching the goal and launched the new Disruptors and went

01:28:34 ◼   ► to the XOXO Festival in September 2012, launched the podcast in December of last year, joined Marco

01:28:41 ◼   ► at the magazine in October of last year and feel like I now, I haven't learned all the secrets,

01:28:48 ◼   ► but now I really have a better sense of what makes sense to crowdfund, I think. And I think this will

01:28:55 ◼   ► be successful. Like we're almost halfway there. - Here's the deal. It's called The

01:28:59 ◼   ► The magazine, the book, which of course is the obvious title.

01:29:03 ◼   ► - How did that? - How did it not be?

01:29:04 ◼   ► So, and in parentheses, year one.

01:29:06 ◼   ► So it's the, pretty much it's the best

01:29:08 ◼   ► of the first year of the magazine.

01:29:10 ◼   ► And you want to do it both as a print and ebook collection.

01:29:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, that was the thing is I thought it didn't,

01:29:17 ◼   ► you know, it could do an ebook very easily, right?

01:29:19 ◼   ► That doesn't take a lot of time and effort.

01:29:21 ◼   ► And it wouldn't actually, it could be well-designed,

01:29:24 ◼   ► but you wouldn't get the full benefit

01:29:25 ◼   ► because I'd be thinking mostly about people

01:29:28 ◼   ► reading an EPUB, say, or Moby on a Kindle.

01:29:30 ◼   ► So it'd be relatively simplified.

01:29:32 ◼   ► So I thought, you know, we should put a stick in the sand.

01:29:34 ◼   ► Like we're electronic periodical.

01:29:37 ◼   ► Why don't we do a hardcover book

01:29:38 ◼   ► that's designed like a magazine?

01:29:40 ◼   ► So we have the magazine style of design

01:29:44 ◼   ► that we don't even do in the app

01:29:45 ◼   ► because the app is meant for simple reading.

01:29:47 ◼   ► We're gonna take advantage of the print medium

01:29:49 ◼   ► and then we'll produce a PDF, an EPUB,

01:29:50 ◼   ► and a Moby version of it as well, all without DRM.

01:29:54 ◼   ► None of that goddamn DRM.

01:29:55 ◼   ► You can read it wherever you want to.

01:29:58 ◼   ► Put it on every device you own, every computer.

01:30:01 ◼   ► But yeah, I want to do a hardcover book

01:30:03 ◼   ► so that it'd be something special.

01:30:04 ◼   ► And there'd be a reason people would be motivated

01:30:07 ◼   ► to be part of the Kickstarter,

01:30:08 ◼   ► 'cause there was a reason for it.

01:30:09 ◼   ► It wasn't like, hey, I can't afford to make an ebook.

01:30:12 ◼   ► It's like printing costs a lot of money.

01:30:13 ◼   ► So I need to pull together people to make it happen.

01:30:17 ◼   ► - When did you announce this?

01:30:18 ◼   ► It was recent?

01:30:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, it was just before Thanksgiving.

01:30:22 ◼   ► The timing's a little off.

01:30:23 ◼   ► - I was hoping to do it early to be done before Thanksgiving

01:30:26 ◼   ► and then everything always takes longer.

01:30:27 ◼   ► - Oh, I know that.

01:30:28 ◼   ► - You know this feeling.

01:30:29 ◼   ► So I went again this year.

01:30:30 ◼   ► So it launched on, I don't remember the exact date,

01:30:34 ◼   ► I don't know what date it was.

01:30:35 ◼   ► It was two, it was a couple weeks ago.

01:30:37 ◼   ► It was on November 21st, I think.

01:30:41 ◼   ► The same day that I put out issue number 30 of the magazine.

01:30:44 ◼   ► So we're past a year in the magazine.

01:30:46 ◼   ► - We got a $48,000 goal.

01:30:48 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:30:49 ◼   ► - Right now, as we record, it is at 22,555.

01:30:53 ◼   ► just a hair under 50%. But it was a big push at first, and I thought, just watching it,

01:30:59 ◼   ► like the first 24 hours, I thought it was going gangbusters. I still think you're gonna make it.

01:31:03 ◼   ► I think I am. The odds are good. The thing that's interesting, and so some Kickstarters,

01:31:07 ◼   ► there's like three typical Kickstarter profiles, like graphs. One is the, "Oh my god," and it goes

01:31:13 ◼   ► like, like a straight line up until the end. And that's like--

01:31:16 ◼   ► - Somebody asked for $100,000 to make a,

01:31:20 ◼   ► like the watch to turn your iPod,

01:31:24 ◼   ► your little square nano into a watch

01:31:25 ◼   ► and they ask for 100 grand and within three days,

01:31:28 ◼   ► they have 2 million.

01:31:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, and those build on themselves

01:31:31 ◼   ► because there's something appealing,

01:31:32 ◼   ► it's usually consumer products,

01:31:34 ◼   ► something super appealing about it,

01:31:35 ◼   ► or it's like a Veronica Mars where there's an enormous,

01:31:38 ◼   ► they have an audience of tens of millions of people

01:31:40 ◼   ► and a tiny fraction of that audience

01:31:42 ◼   ► is constantly discovering it and spreading it and coming on.

01:31:45 ◼   ► So you have this kind of straight line up,

01:31:47 ◼   ► or maybe it curves up and then tapers off

01:31:49 ◼   ► to like a straight line up.

01:31:50 ◼   ► So that's one kind.

01:31:51 ◼   ► One is this, one is like the,

01:31:54 ◼   ► does kind of badly, badly, badly,

01:31:55 ◼   ► and then suddenly they pull it off

01:31:57 ◼   ► and it goes boom to the top near the end.

01:31:58 ◼   ► They get a whole bunch of people.

01:31:59 ◼   ► Mine is the, apparently,

01:32:01 ◼   ► and I've heard this now since it launched,

01:32:03 ◼   ► I've seen it before, is actually much more typical,

01:32:05 ◼   ► is really huge first day or two,

01:32:07 ◼   ► then you have a nice gentle climb as you go along,

01:32:10 ◼   ► you cross 50% and then a nice huge spike at the end

01:32:14 ◼   ► the last couple days. And that's what, and so the statistics—

01:32:18 ◼   ► Jared: That third one is that this is why daddy drinks curve.

01:32:21 ◼   ► [Laughter]

01:32:21 ◼   ► Pete: Exactly. I know, that's, and you're like, so in my case, 48 grand, we raised $16,000 in 24

01:32:27 ◼   ► hours. Boom! And at 24 hours, it immediately tapered off because people saw like, oh, it's

01:32:32 ◼   ► gonna happen. We hit 33%, they're fine. I mean, literally, at that moment, 24 hours, it went to

01:32:37 ◼   ► that slower taper. And then so, in, you know, in the first day, it was 16 grand, the next 10 days,

01:32:42 ◼   ► or next 14 days, I'm sorry, has been,

01:32:45 ◼   ► or 13 days has been about six or $7,000,

01:32:48 ◼   ► which is much slower.

01:32:50 ◼   ► I have so many people are like,

01:32:51 ◼   ► "Oh, I'm gonna come in, just remind me before it's over."

01:32:53 ◼   ► I'm like, "All right, all right."

01:32:54 ◼   ► - You had a stat, you tweeted the other day

01:32:56 ◼   ► that was something like, it was like the percentage,

01:32:59 ◼   ► once you hit 50%, your odds are pretty good.

01:33:02 ◼   ► It was like 90% or something?

01:33:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, people have done this great crunching

01:33:05 ◼   ► and there's these charts you can look at

01:33:06 ◼   ► like for different projects of different values.

01:33:09 ◼   ► So for zero to $50,000 is one range

01:33:12 ◼   ► or whatever.

01:33:13 ◼   ► So you can look at this thing and you can say,

01:33:14 ◼   ► "Okay, where am I at?"

01:33:16 ◼   ► And once you hit, the sweet spot is,

01:33:20 ◼   ► once you've got half of your goal,

01:33:22 ◼   ► so for me that's $24,000 to $48,000,

01:33:25 ◼   ► and you're a $50,000 less project,

01:33:27 ◼   ► statistically once you reach half the goal,

01:33:30 ◼   ► you are 97% likely, or 97% of projects

01:33:33 ◼   ► that reach half the goal go on to at least fund 100%,

01:33:37 ◼   ► if not more.

01:33:38 ◼   ► So that's a great stat.

01:33:40 ◼   ► The thing about Kickstarter that's fascinating

01:33:41 ◼   ► is it's a 56% failure.

01:33:46 ◼   ► 56% of projects do not fund.

01:33:49 ◼   ► But of those 56%, about a third get no pledges at all.

01:33:54 ◼   ► Somebody posts it and they do not tell anyone about it,

01:33:57 ◼   ► no one even does it.

01:33:58 ◼   ► Another third of the failed ones

01:34:00 ◼   ► get like less than 20% of the funding.

01:34:02 ◼   ► So there's this very narrow band

01:34:03 ◼   ► where people get between 20 to 50% of the funding

01:34:06 ◼   ► and they can't get all the way there.

01:34:08 ◼   ► But once you hit that sort of magic middle point,

01:34:10 ◼   ► it shows enough momentum that it's just a question

01:34:14 ◼   ► of time and that curve.

01:34:15 ◼   ► Most Kickstarter projects, the average project

01:34:17 ◼   ► when you take out the outliers like Pebble or Glyph

01:34:20 ◼   ► or the ones that super fund, Elevation Doc,

01:34:23 ◼   ► most fund at about 105% to 110% of the goal

01:34:28 ◼   ► because people come and they meet it

01:34:29 ◼   ► and they meet it at the end.

01:34:30 ◼   ► They're like, "Oh, they need, I'll raise my pledge

01:34:32 ◼   ► $10 to make it happen," or whatever.

01:34:35 ◼   ► So it's a, I don't wanna say it's a finely tuned art,

01:34:37 ◼   ► but I'm feeling happy about it.

01:34:39 ◼   ► you know, so I should come back. The reason I did it though is like, I like the stories we tell,

01:34:43 ◼   ► right? This is the whole thing. Like it's, this isn't a money-making endeavor in the sense that-

01:34:46 ◼   ► I was about to say, cause you kind of, I was going to come back to that. You kind of hinted at that

01:34:50 ◼   ► a few minutes ago where you somehow, you know, were bringing it up as a money-making event.

01:34:54 ◼   ► I was going to, I was going to tell you, you know, that's not that it's a bad idea to do this.

01:34:58 ◼   ► I think it's a great idea. I think looking at it as a money-making idea is not a good idea.

01:35:03 ◼   ► Oh yeah. No, I mean the diversification of the magazine from being only a subscription-based

01:35:07 ◼   ► periodical to being something that produces content in lots of different ways. That's

01:35:12 ◼   ► the money making idea. That's the I need revenue. I want newsstand now is 95, 92% of the revenue

01:35:18 ◼   ► that comes in is directly from Apple with their 30% cut. And I'd like that to be 25

01:35:23 ◼   ► to 30% in a year.

01:35:24 ◼   ► All right. Can I just put on my consulting ad here?

01:35:27 ◼   ► Yeah, absolutely.

01:35:28 ◼   ► For free. I'm not going to charge you any more.

01:35:30 ◼   ► Oh, good. Excellent. Excellent.

01:35:31 ◼   ► All right. But I am going to tell you how to make more money from the magazine.

01:35:34 ◼   ► Oh, good. Excellent. I want to hear this.

01:35:36 ◼   ► What you do is you sell one sponsorship slot per issue.

01:35:41 ◼   ► And there's a nice one full page ad

01:35:45 ◼   ► from that issue's sponsor.

01:35:48 ◼   ► Boom, there you go.

01:35:49 ◼   ► That would have cost like $50,000 in consulting fees

01:35:54 ◼   ► if you had to come on my show.

01:35:56 ◼   ► - I appreciate that.

01:35:57 ◼   ► - Have you, I mean, surely you've thought

01:35:59 ◼   ► about putting advertising in the magazine.

01:36:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't have an objection.

01:36:04 ◼   ► - So I guess I have a structural objection

01:36:06 ◼   ► as opposed to say an ethical one.

01:36:08 ◼   ► So there's a mission thing,

01:36:09 ◼   ► which is that it's been sold as something that has no ads.

01:36:11 ◼   ► And so if it changes-

01:36:13 ◼   ► - Has it though?

01:36:14 ◼   ► Is that really true?

01:36:15 ◼   ► - It has, oh yeah, from day one,

01:36:16 ◼   ► Marcos pushed that out, I pushed that out as the idea

01:36:18 ◼   ► is there's no cruft and there's no ads.

01:36:21 ◼   ► - Well, I don't know.

01:36:22 ◼   ► I think you could renege on that.

01:36:24 ◼   ► - Well, no, I absolutely could,

01:36:25 ◼   ► but it takes, there's a threshold to overcome

01:36:27 ◼   ► to say like, okay, we said that

01:36:29 ◼   ► and now we're doing this other thing, all you subscribers.

01:36:31 ◼   ► So I'm not conscientiously opposed to advertising if it works, and especially that kind of model.

01:36:37 ◼   ► The sponsorship model, like this is why I like the podcasting model, is that yes, you

01:36:42 ◼   ► have ads on a podcast, but it's much more in the mode of this cooperative thing.

01:36:47 ◼   ► It doesn't feel like advertising the same way that horrible flashy banner ads feel like.

01:36:50 ◼   ► Right?

01:36:51 ◼   ► And I really think that the listening experience bears that out, where when you listen to terrestrial

01:36:57 ◼   ► radio, even on FM, it does seem to me like there's too many ad breaks.

01:37:03 ◼   ► And when you listen to AM radio, if you ever listen to like, just, you know, like just

01:37:06 ◼   ► for shits and giggles, like listen to the Rush Limbaugh show, there are so many ad breaks,

01:37:11 ◼   ► it is ridiculous.

01:37:13 ◼   ► The only show that I know of that doesn't have that problem is the Howard Stern show,

01:37:17 ◼   ► which does far fewer breaks, but does really long breaks, like where they put all the ads

01:37:22 ◼   ► into one stretch in the hour.

01:37:26 ◼   ► and people listen to podcast ads

01:37:28 ◼   ► because they don't feel like ads.

01:37:30 ◼   ► And so I could see doing, I love how that works

01:37:33 ◼   ► and people respond to it.

01:37:35 ◼   ► So having a sponsor for the magazine

01:37:37 ◼   ► where it's like one quality thing,

01:37:39 ◼   ► it's like this is a roadblock

01:37:40 ◼   ► and so-and-so is sponsoring this issue.

01:37:42 ◼   ► Here's an advertisement and we're gonna send you one email

01:37:45 ◼   ► or God knows what we're gonna do.

01:37:46 ◼   ► That doesn't seem antithetical.

01:37:48 ◼   ► The problem I have structurally though

01:37:49 ◼   ► is that subscribers are worth a ton of money

01:37:52 ◼   ► as a subscriber in advertising,

01:37:54 ◼   ► typically to reach the audience of the scale that I have,

01:37:58 ◼   ► there's not enough money in the ad side

01:38:00 ◼   ► to make that worthwhile.

01:38:01 ◼   ► - See, I think the problem is convincing advertisers

01:38:05 ◼   ► that it's not like buying an ad in another magazine.

01:38:09 ◼   ► - Well, that's exactly it.

01:38:10 ◼   ► Well, I did the math.

01:38:11 ◼   ► If you go to, I put this up at my website,

01:38:14 ◼   ► it's glog.glennf.com.

01:38:16 ◼   ► I did the math a few weeks ago

01:38:18 ◼   ► 'cause people kept asking me about why I don't have ads

01:38:21 ◼   ► in the magazine.

01:38:22 ◼   ► I said, if it was the conventional model,

01:38:24 ◼   ► I would probably need as many as 20 million page views

01:38:26 ◼   ► a month to equal--

01:38:28 ◼   ► - No, I'm not saying your math is wrong.

01:38:29 ◼   ► I'm saying, nope, that's not--

01:38:31 ◼   ► - But I mean, that's right.

01:38:32 ◼   ► Oh yeah, exactly.

01:38:33 ◼   ► I've got like, we've done a lot of articles.

01:38:35 ◼   ► We have 150 articles.

01:38:36 ◼   ► I'm not gonna get, there's no universe

01:38:37 ◼   ► in which I can do that, right, to get 20 million.

01:38:40 ◼   ► So right, so with the current rates that are paid,

01:38:43 ◼   ► with the yield, with selling inventory,

01:38:45 ◼   ► and that doesn't even include,

01:38:46 ◼   ► you know, includes commissions to ad people,

01:38:48 ◼   ► but that doesn't include me having an ad staff.

01:38:49 ◼   ► I have to outsource it.

01:38:51 ◼   ► So I need 20 million page reviews, let's say roughly,

01:38:53 ◼   ► to reach what I'm getting from subscribers paying.

01:38:56 ◼   ► That's really hard, but one sponsor who is a supplement

01:39:00 ◼   ► to who makes the thing possible,

01:39:02 ◼   ► that's the extra revenue necessary to make the thing grow

01:39:04 ◼   ► or whatever, that's a different equation.

01:39:06 ◼   ► Someone might be willing to pay a sizable amount of money

01:39:09 ◼   ► to be exclusive and to reach them people in a tasteful way.

01:39:12 ◼   ► And that's again, the podcast model,

01:39:14 ◼   ► that's why it's valuable here

01:39:15 ◼   ► and it could be valuable there.

01:39:16 ◼   ► - But let me do my third sponsor.

01:39:19 ◼   ► And it's again, an old friend of the show,

01:39:23 ◼   ► long time sponsor and event apart. An event apart is an intensely educational two day

01:39:30 ◼   ► learning session, a great conference for people who make websites. And instead of being like

01:39:38 ◼   ► a once a year thing where you have to put on your schedule, book travel and stuff like

01:39:42 ◼   ► that, they effectively come to you. They've got events next year in 2014 around North

01:39:49 ◼   ► America there in San Francisco that's this month Atlanta Seattle Boston San

01:39:56 ◼   ► Diego Washington DC and I think that's just like the first half of the year you

01:40:05 ◼   ► know almost a monthly event go to their website find an event near you and you

01:40:11 ◼   ► will not be disappointed now an event apart was founded by Eric Meyer who I

01:40:17 ◼   ► I think easily you could say knows more about CSS than anybody walking the face of the earth.

01:40:22 ◼   ► And Jeffrey Zeldman, longtime friend of the show and one of the great proponents

01:40:29 ◼   ► of web standards and the whole thing is dedicated to the proposition that the creators

01:40:34 ◼   ► of great web experiences deserve a great learning experience.

01:40:38 ◼   ► These guys have one of the best speaker lineups of any conference I've ever seen.

01:40:42 ◼   ► If you build websites and you've not been to an event apart, you're really missing out.

01:40:48 ◼   ► If you have been to an event apart, you don't even have to listen to me because you know

01:40:51 ◼   ► how good it was and I'm sure you want to go back.