Live Blog

• After Kara Swisher assists Jill Sobule with a song penned for (and about) Rupert Murdoch, Walt Mossberg joins her on the stage and they thank the audience. “We double-mean it this year,” says Walt.
• Walt and Kara explain their “Web 3.0″ thesis, which you can find explained in detail here. They also plug the new All Things Digital iphone app (which is excellent!) and run through a series of less helpful iPhone apps–less helpful because they don’t exist. The Carol Bartz app gets some applause.
• Walt: It’s all about apps. Apple (AAPL) dominates that business but we will show some other great stuff at this conference. Kara: Normally we start out with big-company CEOs, but instead, we’re going to bring out the company that everyone is talking about. Here are Biz Stone and Evan Williams of Twitter.
• Kara shows off a video that depicts her mother’s low opinion of Twitter. Well worth watching.
• Walt: We also have real data about people’s opinions re: digital media, commissioned by an actual polling firm–Penn, Schoen & Berland. For instance, only 51 percent of Twitter users are on the service once a month. What’s the deal with that?

• Evan: That’s fair. We know it’s in its infancy. There are lots of ways to fix the adoption curve that we know how to do.
• Evan explains the history of Twitter. He sold Blogger to Google, hired Biz, started Odeo, a podcasting company. Walt: “Which got crushed by Apple.”
• Biz: I followed Evan to Odeo, and we started working with Jack Dorsey, who had this idea that just involved IM-like status updates that could update via mobile. To Ev’s credit, as CEO of Odeo, he sent us off to work on that.
• Evan: A few months later, at Odeo, we just didn’t see a bright future for that. Generally, if I’m not personally invested in the product, and don’t use it myself…
• Biz: I started playing with Twitter and I started laughing at Evan’s posts and thought that was a good sign.

• Evan: It was so simple. “It didn’t look like a real thing. The simplicity turned off some of our engineers. It wasn’t obvious at all.
• Walt: How many users do you have? Biz and Ev won’t comment.
• Evan: We wound down Odeo, returned the money to investors and made them whole and went off to focus on Twitter.
• Walt points out that most users don’t use the Twitter.com interface. Biz: We have at least twice as much usage via the open API and other clients as we do via Twitter.com.
• Walt: Is that good thing? Evan: Yes. Very much so. We’ve never built an iPhone app, but there are at least a dozen of them. You can’t win by trying to corral everything in. We have all these people adding value. We can’t build all the stuff people want with 45 people.

• Biz: Openness, open platforms are a big deal. We’re seeing lots of this. And people communicating on these open platforms is a big deal. It’s not just with communication. It’s with open-source software, transparency at companies, etc. People are building a ton of value this way.
• Evan: This openness helped create Summize, the search engine we bought a year ago. That couldn’t have happened if we weren’t open with our data. Turns out there’s a huge opportunity with search, and we hadn’t foreseen that.
• Walt: Will future projects and developments happen on Web pages or on clients/apps?
• Evan: We’re interface-agnostic. We’re more concerned about what the data is and that it should flow to all clients. I don’t think we’ll build a desktop app, but we will tweak the Web site a bit.
• Kara: Everyone’s talking about real-time search. But what kind of real business opportunity is available there?
• Evan: Real-time search means different things on different platforms. On Google, it’s Web search. On Twitter, it’s Twitter search. It’s different from what other people are talking about when they’re talking about real-time search. One of Twitter’s properties is that it’s low-latency, and speed is important in information dissemination.
• Kara: So what’s the value in that? What’s the advertising premise for that?
• Biz: When I think about search, I think about a box and a button. When I think about Twitter, I zoom out a bit, and I think of discovery.

• Walt: Is there a way to sell that?
• Biz: Pfft….There’s a way to make introductions to people, to tell them that things and people are available on Twitter, and there’s certainly money in that.
• Walt cites another piece of polling data: 30 percent say they’d be willing to see banner advertising on Twitter. Does that work for you guys?
• Evan: I think it’s probably the least interesting thing we can do.
• Kara: So you’re least interested in doing it?
• Evan: Yeah.
• Walt: 24 percent say they’d pay for power accounts. Do you think that’s a good idea?
• Evan: Yes, I think it’s a good idea. We’ve talked about it for a long time. Here’s how it might work: Lots of commercial users are on Twitter already. That’s not odd, and it’s happening successfully already. But we could give those users tools to make it better. For instance, here’s how P&G (PG) might sell Tide…Wait that’s a bad idea. How about The Wall Street Journal? No, they’re a media company; that won’t work either. How about Dunkin’ Donuts? People like Dunkin’ Donuts. They have an affinity for that, and they’re already following Dunkin’ Donuts. So one thing we can do is tell new users that the Dunkin’ Donuts account on Twitter is actually Dunkin’ Donuts. To verify that.
• Walt: OK, what else could you do with that?

• Evan: There’s a million ways, if you’re doing this in real time, to make this useful, and it won’t be annoying to people because if they don’t want that information, they won’t subscribe to a particular account.
• Biz on hype: We realize that this constant stream of attention will eventually go away. We have to keep concentrating on the company. “We’re one percent into Twitter.”
• Kara: You’ve raised a lot of money. You’ve had a lot of interest from acquirers. Why didn’t you sell to Facebook?
• Evan: I have a big thing about building sustainable companies. And I think that’s what Twitter should be.
• Walt: So in five years you won’t have sold this? You’ll still be running it?
• Evan: Yes. I didn’t expect to be working on this when I spun Twitter out of Odeo. But I came back to it because it was the most interesting thing I could work on.
• Kara: Do you have Zuckerberg-like control of your company, where you have the ability to control your fate and turn down a $1 billion offer from the likes of Microsoft?
• Evan. Yes. And the board feels the same way.
• Walt: You sure your board doesn’t want to sell the company within five years?
• Evan: Sequoia likes to brag about YouTube. But they also aspire to start companies like Apple and other cool companies. I think VCs like to brag about starting big awesome companies.
• Biz: When we met Bijan Sabet at Spark, I remember telling Ev that I liked him a lot. And Ev met him and said “he’s a little too nice.” Then we met the rest of the guys. [Pause]. And then we were in.
• Kara: What’s next big delta for you, the next big innovation?
• Evan. We’re not doing a TV show. We look at that like an iPhone platform that can have apps on it, but we’re not doing a show ourselves.
• Biz: I think the next big thing is scaling this company.
• Evan: Definitely scaling the company. We’re 45 people. We need to make the product better, we need to solve the awareness-to-engagement ramp. We also want to deepen the value proposition. There are lots of head-slapping things we can do to improve the product.
• Walt: I was Twitter skeptic. But I really go into it when my colleague Katie told me that this was an interesting way to keep up with news. Is that something you can build on?
• Evan: That’s the big secret for people like Kara’s mom, and we can do a better job of explaining that. Twitter disseminates information and it builds relationships. You can do one or both of those things.
• Kara: Do you need to raise more money?
• Evan: Well, we need to start building a monetizable business.
• Kara: When does that begin?
• Evan: There will be a moment when we turn something on.

• Time for Q&A: Roger McNamee from Elevation Partners begs the guys not to do midday planned maintenance outages. He also asks them to scale faster and to hire more than 45 people.
• Evan: Go to Twitter.com, and you’ll see that we’re hiring. We’re not planning on staying at 45 people.
• Q: What do you think will be key way you bring in money in a couple of years?
• Biz: You need to leave room for emergence to take place. We’re doing that in the way we structure the company and the way we hire people, etc. I’ve always said that if we described Twitter in three sentences, the first two would be about not putting too much fidelity on it, and the last sentence would be “we don’t know.”
• Q: What about an Apple-like App Store for Twitter, where you guys could sort and authenticate apps?
• Biz: I think exposing apps to people would be a good idea. I don’t know about charging for it. We know that certain apps make Twitter work much better for people, and we should promote them and point people to them. “I would like to do that right now. I don’t know how soon we’ll get to it.”
• Q: Not really a question, but a plea to not abuse the access to personal data that Twitter already has.
• Evan: We know not kill the goose. There are things that we could do that would be really stupid, and that would be dangerous, but those aren’t even the most tempting things to do.
• Q: In traditional media and marketing, we have tools to prove the value of different tools. How to tell marketing clients that they’re reaching the right audience, etc.?
• Biz: Start by typing their name in Twitter search and showing them how many people are talking about their product. They’ll immediately want to respond. That’s the easy answer.
• Q: What about looking at Nielsen-like partners to help refine metrics and tell marketers who’s looking at what?
• Biz: There are lots of interesting things we could do. I think that it will be more compelling when you’re not just following a set list of people. Twitter will be more interesting when it starts telling you things like “You go to Whole Foods a lot…maybe you’d like to know that this is on sale today, etc.”
• Evan: But it will always be recipient-driven.
• Walt: Biz, please tell me about your name.
• Biz: I couldn’t pronounce my name, which was Christopher Isaac Stone, and I said “bzzz” and that was that.

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as we were able. It was not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090526/biz-stone-and-evan-williams/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20090406/meet-podcastings-new-star-radio-refugee-adam-carolla/ http://allthingsd.com/20090406/meet-podcastings-new-star-radio-refugee-adam-carolla/#comments Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:00:48 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=5978 Adam Carolla used to get paid a lot of money to host a morning radio show with a national audience. Now he’s spending his own money to produce a podcast for a fraction of his old audience.

Does that sound like progress to you? It should.

That’s because Carolla’s old gig, which ended in late February when CBS Radio (CBS) pulled the plug on his show, made him just another guy trying unsuccessfully to fill Howard Stern’s shoes.

But the comedian’s podcasts are something else, and they don’t sound like anything else on the radio: Unedited, rambling conversations with a single guest that often sound more like monologues than an actual interview. They’re profane, they run an hour or more, and they make me laugh out loud. (You can get a small taste of what they’re like via the video clip at the bottom of this post. Be warned: There is a smattering of R-rated language in that one).

I’m not the only one. Carolla has been podcasting every weekday for the past month and a half, and an average show finds an audience of about 400,000 people. His most successful ones have nearly doubled that total.

That’s nothing compared to his last radio job, which was broadcast out of Los Angeles and syndicated in a dozen other markets. But in the world of podcasting, that qualifies as an instant hit, and it’s enough to keep his show at or near the top of Apple’s (AAPL) most popular podcast list at its iTunes store.

The other top podcasts, by the way, are all spinoffs or repackagings of shows made by big media companies–NPR, Time Warner’s (TWX) HBO and Discovery Communications (DISCA). But Carolla’s show is created from scratch: It’s just him and a handful of assistants who help him record the show and upload it to the Web. He started off taping the shows in his house in the Hollywood Hills; now he’s moved it to a garage he rents in an unlovely industrial stretch in the San Fernando Valley.

All in all, Carolla estimates he’s spending about $3,000 a month to produce the show, primarily on bandwidth bills. Revenue: Zero.

That’s primarily because Carolla can’t make any money from his show until the end of the year. He’s still getting paid–very well–by CBS, and his contract has a noncompete. But it’s also because it’s unclear how Carolla could actually go about making money from his podcast even if he wanted to.

The basic options: Try to charge his listeners or try to sell advertising. The former hasn’t been done before, and the latter hasn’t made other podcasters much money so far.

“I think that he’s going to have a tough time,” says Marc Horine, VP at ESPN Digital Media, who oversees a stable of podcasts that were downloaded about eight million times a month last year. Even at that volume, Horine says, ESPN has only been able to turn that into a “7-figure-plus” business–and that’s with a large sales staff and the ESPN brand name.

The problem is that podcasts are still considered “experimental” buys for advertisers. And until podcasts can aggregate bigger audiences–and provide marketers with better ways of tracking their ads’ performance–they are probably going to stay that way.

But I’m going to be slightly more optimistic than I usually am on this one: I think that Carolla’s profile, combined with a dedicated audience, could convince a handful of advertisers to take a flyer and sponsor the show. That still won’t come close to replicating his radio money or the money he’ll make if CBS decides to pick up the sitcom he’s working on for the network.

But as Carolla notes in the interview below, entertainers don’t have any choice but to be on the Web. And figuring out how to make good stuff people like is much harder than figuring out how to make money from it.

Apologies for my stammering and stumbling midway through this interview, by the way: Sounding cogent while you ask questions is a lot harder than it looks.

[ See post to watch video ]

And here’s a sampling of what a Carolla podcast is like: A snippet of his recent podcast with writer Dana Gould. Again, be warned that there’s a light dusting of cursing here.

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