When event organizers debate strategies for moving a show’s brand and its audience interaction closer to a year-round model, the TED conferences are often name-dropped as successful examples.

The event, which launched in 1984, started as an exclusive, invite-only conference that featured cutting-edge and inspirational talks focused on technology, entertainment and design (hence the show’s name). By 2001, it was acquired by a foundation set up by Chris Anderson, the founder of Future Publishing, and turned into a non-profit organization. At that point, TED began to move its exclusive content toward a more open model adhering to its new tagline: “Ideas Worth Spreading.”

By 2007, TED.com was launched as a platform to feature, for free, videos of the TEDTalks. The content was collected and presented online as a way to further Anderson’s mission of spreading the TED talks to a wider audience. In five years, the site has hit 500 million video views. Here, in an interview conducted over email, June Cohen, the executive producer of TED Media and one of the executives behind the launch of TED.com, talks with EXPO about the strategy behind the site and how it has greatly expanded the TED brand across the globe.

EXPO: Please provide a brief description of your current role in the TED organization. What are your responsibilities? Also, what is TED Media’s role as a group?

June Cohen: I have a dual role at TED. I co-produce our annual conference in California, and also lead our digital/media group, overseeing the development of TEDTalks, TED.com and other experimental initiatives to bring TED out into other media. As a group, our Media Team is responsible for shooting, editing and encoding the TEDTalks; distribution of the TEDTalks; Web design and development for TED.com and TED apps; engineering; editorial (including the TEDBlog); photography and imagery; and online customer support.


EXPO: Describe the origination of TED.com. What was the opportunity and what’s the core strategy behind the site?

Cohen: TED began as an exclusive, invite-only conference; what happened at TED, stayed at TED. But in 2005, TED’s curator Chris Anderson (who acquired the conference from its founder in 2001) decided that the talks at TED deserved a wider audience. Under his leadership, TED had become a non-profit, and this openness was in line with its mission.

At first, we investigated bringing the talks to TV, but that proved a non-starter. This was right at the moment when online video was taking off—YouTube had recently launched; the video iPod was around the corner. And so we decided to launch TEDTalks as an online video series, offered free to the world, so the ideas could truly spread. And it’s important to note that spreading ideas was our entire mission. We weren’t trying to sell conference tickets, we weren’t trying to build the TED brand, and we weren’t looking for a new revenue stream. Our entire goal was around “Ideas worth spreading” and that allowed us to focus on those elements that best served our online audience. When we launched, the goal of TED.com was to create an authentic TED experience online—one that gave everyone in the world access to great thinkers and doers, and that facilitated, at all levels, the spread of ideas.
  


EXPO: Talk about the path that the content takes from show to Web.

Cohen: Our conferences are all shot in HD, on multiple cameras, and the footage is recorded straight to hard drive. Each talk is then edited, by one of our staff editors, almost as if it were a short film. We use multiple camera angles in order to create a dynamic edit, emphasizing tight close-ups that will allow the viewer to connect emotionally to the speaker. (Nothing is more boring than a talk filmed on a single camera, from far away.) After the talk is edited, it’s encoded using our custom software for distribution on multiple platforms at multiple quality levels. Simultaneously, we’re writing the editorial copy that will accompany the talk (headline, description, etc.) and choosing a photo to represent it. We also prepare a full transcript of the talk before it’s published on the site (This powers our subtitles and allows for translation later on.) Finally, the talk is published (one each day), and promoted through multiple online channels—Twitter, Facebook, etc.

EXPO: As the organization has grown, how has this impacted your content distribution? 



Cohen: In truth, it’s the other way around. As our content spread more and more widely it forced changes in the organization. You have to grow, in order to support a growing audience, taking things like customer support and site speed/security seriously. But our organization growth has also opened up new opportunities: We now publish a new talk daily, including many from other events; we also have powerful distribution partnerships with organizations like YouTube, iTunes, DailyMotion, Delta Airlines and others.


EXPO: Talk about the underlying theme of ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’ and how this is actually accomplished through TED.com’s social networking functionality and other ways the content is shared among the broader audience.

Cohen: At a fundamental level, TED is spread every time someone gets inspired by a talk, and feels an unstoppable urge to share it with friends, family, colleagues, students. We’ve don’t have a marketing budget and have never launched an ad campaign. TEDTalks have always spread by word of mouth.
But the technology driving the dissemination has evolved. In the beginning, talks were primarily shared through email, blogs and social link-sharing sites, like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. A few years later, Facebook became a major player. Twitter emerged shortly after that, and the two have utterly changed the way ideas spread online. But it’s still evolving: There’s Google+ now, and in a few months, no doubt, there will be something else.

There’s also a lot of real-world sharing, TEDTalks are shown in classrooms and in boardrooms, at conferences and community meetings.

EXPO: Can you explain how the TED Open Translation Project works?

Cohen: The TED Open Translation Project allows volunteers around the world to translate TEDTalks into other languages. The translations are then used to support both subtitles and a translated transcript. We launched this project in response to repeated requests from audience members, who wanted to translate the talks themselves. Their motives were very pure: They were inspired by specific talks, and wanted to share them with friends and family members in their own language.
We now have more than 6,000 volunteer translators who have produced 20,000+ translations in 80+ languages. In some languages, our archive of 1,000+ talks is translated into more than 10 languages. This is transformative. It allows our speakers to truly reach across geographic, cultural and language barriers to spread their ideas.

EXPO: How have you made finding talks on TED.com both serendipitous and easy?

Cohen: We feel the true TED experience happens not from watching a single talk, but from seeing several talks in succession and making connections between them. This is part of the magic that happens at a live TED event. But for an online audience, we can’t count on their undivided attention and can’t “force” them to watch a curated set of talks in a precise order. So instead we provide multiple pathways through the talks and suggestions to help them create their own experience.
We organize and link talks in the conventional way—by tag/topic (i.e., “Technology”, “Design”, “Business”) and also by theme—which are more abstract, editorial groupings (“Tales of invention”, “The rise of collaboration”). We also let people find talks based on length and by the emotion they provoke: “Inspiring”, “Jaw-breaking” “Funny” and so on. By providing multiple entry points and links between talks, we allow users to build their own TED experience on the fly.

EXPO: What are the key metrics behind TED.com and how do they influence site development?

Cohen: We pay very close attention to performance metrics on TED.com—not just to track “success” or “growth”, but to understand the user experience, and continually improve it. We look at typical factors, like the number visitors and page views, how often people return, how long they stay, etc. We also look at things like the number of comments, the number of “shares” and the number of customer support inquiries.
But the most important statistic for us is the number of videos viewed each month. As I mentioned, our core goal is to spread ideas and the number of videos viewed is a close proxy for that. What I can tell you is that—on our 5th anniversary—we hit the 500 million mark. So half a billion TEDTalks have been viewed worldwide.

EXPO: How has the ‘open source’ approach to content benefitted TED as an ongoing concern?

Cohen: Well, as I mentioned earlier, our goal in launching TEDTalks was to spread ideas. So the fact that our talks have been watched more than 500 million times, in dozens of languages is validating. But paradoxically, once we started providing all our content for free, the demand for the conference itself increased dramatically. The benefit of TED’s radical openness just can’t be overestimated.