TED Conference — Episode 2: Giving even more away

In Episode 1 on March 8, 2007 came news of the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) organization's decision to offer a number of its previously high-priced talks (admission is $6,000) as free online videos.

Now comes Bob Tedeschi reporting in the April 16, 2007 New York Times that TED's decided to put up about 100 of its 20-minute TED talks for whomever cares to watch and listen.

In June of last year a handful of free videos went up as an experiment, which proved so popular that by January 2007 a total of 44 were online, viewed so far over three million times.

Don't think TED's doing it out of the goodness of its heart: June Cohen, director of TED Media and the driving force in its move to the web, told Tedeschi that "the same year we started releasing most of our content for free we raised our conference price by nearly 50% and still sold out in 12 days."

In the YouTube video up top Jeff Han presents his Multi-Touch sensing work at the TED Conference 2006.

Here's the Times article.

Giving Away Information, But Increasing Revenue

Those who don’t have $6,000 or enough prominent connections to get into a TED conference can take heart. The price of admission just went to zero, provided you can settle for a more remote experience.

The TED organization (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design) runs an invitation-only conference in Monterey, Calif., every year for movers and shakers in business and nonprofit circles.

Yesterday, TED introduced a Web site that offers about 100 of its TED Talks, the polished 20-minute presentations for which the conference is renowned.

The new site will generate more advertising revenue for TED, but more important, conference leaders said, it will expose TED’s content to millions of people who would otherwise never attend the event.

In so doing, TED is at the vanguard of a trend in the conference industry, where organizers have begun to exploit assets that in years past evaporated as soon as speakers left the stage.

“I’m so struck by it anytime I’m at a great event,” said June Cohen, director of media for TED, a nonprofit business based in New York. “That was so wonderful, but now it’s gone. It’s a shame they’re not captured and preserved.”

Ms. Cohen said TED’s organizers began posting last June a handful of free videos from past conferences on TED.com, with “fairly aggressive goals for how I thought they’d do. But we blew past those pretty quickly.” By January, the number of TED Talks on the site had grown to 44, and they had been viewed more than three million times.

Based on that success, Ms. Cohen said that the organization pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into its video production operations and into the development of a Web site to showcase about 100 of the talks.

The presentations are arranged thematically on the site’s home page. For example, visitors can browse on “Spectacular Performance” to find one of 11 TED presentations chosen for the category by TED editors (like a piano improvisation by the 14-year old prodigy Jennifer Lin in 2004), or find 22 TED Talks roughly related to “The Rise of Collaboration.”

“We’re creating a TED experience online,” Ms. Cohen said, “and that’s not about watching a single talk, but watching several in succession that relate to each other in unexpected ways.”

With the new site, each presentation has its own Web page that includes an overview of the Talk, a biography of the speaker, comments from users, links to related Web pages and a way to rate the presentation that differs from conventional methods. Users choose three characteristics from a list that includes “long winded” and “courageous,” among others.

Three of the more than 50 presentations from last month’s conference, including high-definition video of former President Bill Clinton’s speech, are featured on the new site.

From a business standpoint, Ms. Cohen said that giving away the conference’s content in such a highly polished manner has “completely transformed” the organization.

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“Conventional business logic would tell you that in a community like TED you have to keep your commodity scarce and expensive to retain brand value,” she said. “But the same year we started releasing most of our content for free we raised our conference price by nearly 50 percent and still sold out in 12 days.”

“This has actually created a huge challenge for us, in how to manage our growth,” Ms. Cohen added. “We have a waiting list of a couple thousand people for the event and we can’t grow it more. So the question is how to expand it in other ways and do more online.”

Jack Pitney, head of marketing for BMW of North America, said visits to the company’s Web site have jumped strongly in the last year, to about 1.7 million people a month. “That’s due to a confluence of a lot of things, but the TED Talks certainly contributed to a lot more people coming to the site,” he said.

Of the 11,000 or so trade shows and corporate events each year in the United States, about 10 percent in the last year have begun to use videos from their shows to generate more revenue, according to Darlene Gudea, publisher of Trade Show Executive Magazine, an industry publication. “Show organizers are realizing that only part of the industry comes to a trade show, leaving a lot of educational opportunities, and revenues, on the table,” Ms. Gudea said.

And trade shows themselves are a booming business. According to a recent report from American Business Media, a business-to-business media industry group, revenue from trade shows last year grew by 10 percent, to $11.3 billion, and for the first time exceeded revenue from industry magazines.

One example of a company that is capitalizing on the trend is Reed Exhibitions, a unit of Reed Elsevier, which organizes about 60 large-scale conferences in the United States each year. Two weeks ago, Reed introduced out ISC365.com, a site devoted to ISC West, an Internet security conference held in March in Las Vegas.

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In a test that could eventually extend to all of the company’s events, Reed will soon begin posting videos from some of the roughly 90 sessions held during the three-day event on ISC365.com. Dean Russo, a Reed Exhibitions group vice president who oversees the company’s Internet activities, said subscribers would pay about $300 to $350 to download five of those videos. Other sessions, he said, would be supported by advertising and will be offered free.

Mr. Russo said that about 25,000 people attended ISC West, and about 1,200 paid $400 to $1000 to attend educational sessions. “We’re thinking in the first six months we could bring in at least that many people with the online subscription, and it could potentially be many, many times that,” he said.

Depending on the objectives of the conference speakers, that approach could meet little resistance. Those who earn a living speaking on the conference circuit may have to negotiate different agreements with trade shows that seek to capitalize on those speeches in perpetuity.

But for others, like the New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, the exposure is enough payment.

Mr. Gladwell, who spoke at the 2004 TED conference, said his talk was “a riff that was taken from a New Yorker piece just before it came out. Certainly more people have read that story as a result of my talk being online. If I can get people to read my stuff more, that’s all a plus.”