[SOUND] All right, so, thank you so much for that. 0:00 I'm having a hard time seeing you guys. 0:03 So, I am the last presenter today before you guys get to the pool party. 0:05 Is everybody excited for the pool party [NOISE]? 0:10 Come on, come on, let's get a little more of that, cuz I'm still 0:13 drinking my coffee right now, so I need a little more energy from you guys. 0:16 So, I can actually get this show on the road. 0:19 All right, one more time. 0:22 Is everybody excited? 0:23 [NOISE]. 0:25 All right. 0:26 Thank you. 0:27 I know [UNKNOWN] is totally excited. 0:28 So, I'll just get the show on the road for you guys. 0:30 So, my name is Ben. 0:34 I run this company called Cheezburger. 0:34 It's kind of ridiculous. 0:36 Let's be honest. 0:37 I post internet memes, funny pictures, cat photos on the internet. 0:38 And that's my business. 0:41 And, that's how I make a living. 0:43 And so, we run sites like Fail Blog, I can 0:45 ask Cheeseburger, Know Your Meme, Meme Base, things like that. 0:48 And our job is to make the world happy for just a few moments every single day. 0:51 And the surprising thing is, I've been doing this for seven years now. 0:56 I've been doing this for a very long time, and when I actually started doing this 0:59 It was 2007 I started the company september 1:04 07 which is basically when the recession started. 1:07 So when the recession started I quit my job to go post cat photos on the internet. 1:13 Had I known there was a recession, I probably would not 1:19 have done that but then it also would not have led to. 1:22 Things like this. 1:25 This is our promo shot from Bravo, the TV 1:26 network for our reality show called LOLWork, LOL work. 1:29 Which chronicle the crazy, you know, quirky mayhem of 1:32 an internet company that posts cat photos on the internet. 1:36 And so, there I am, very well Photoshopped, so 1:39 I'm gonna keep this photo on my slide there forever. 1:42 There were actually no cats present during the filming [LAUGH]. 1:46 Of that picture. 1:48 That's what the power of Photoshop is for. 1:50 And so, what I've learned in the process is that, you know, we've 1:52 been building this business to make people happy for a few moments every day. 1:55 And 100% of our business is advertising driven. 1:58 And so what that led me to 2:01 do is understand deeply the relationship between. 2:02 Media, devices and how human beings consume that content. 2:06 And so, there is an old saying coined by Marshall Mcluhan, a media 2:11 theories from the theorist from the 1960s that says, the medium is the message. 2:15 Okay, what does that really mean? 2:21 The medium is the message is a way of saying that. 2:22 By the nature of the device that you use to 2:26 create or consume content, the nature of the story changes. 2:29 In other words, a T.V. show will tend to behave in a very different way 2:33 than a newspaper article, which will be a very different way then a radio broadcast. 2:39 And so Marshall McLuhan, you know, when you listen to 2:45 him he's kind of a little crazy, but he was right. 2:48 When we had the advent of mass communications in the form 2:50 of television and radio, the type of stories that we told changed. 2:53 And so what happened was that as we adapted from television to the internet 2:58 I believe that instead of the medium being the message, the format is the message. 3:02 And I'll explain this in a little bit. 3:07 The format, is what's inside the computer. 3:08 [LAUGH] None of you need to break your computers open to figure that out. 3:12 But the format, is the content and 3:16 how it is formatted, inside your specific devices. 3:19 Whether that be a tablet, a phone, or laptop, or desktop, or so have you. 3:23 And so what happens is that when we hold a device, or when we use a device, 3:26 we're constantly interacting with specific formats that were invented 3:30 for that device, or adapted from the previous one. 3:35 And I, let's talk about ada, adaptation here, okay. 3:39 Why is your iPhone 5, 16:9 format? 3:41 Why is the screen a specific dimension and ratio? 3:43 It isn't because that is actually the best way, for a phone to be sized. 3:49 It is because, a long time ago, I think 3:53 in the early 90's, a bunch of TV manufacturers 3:56 go together and said, we wanna create a new 3:59 standard called HDTV and we need to pick a ratio. 4:00 Cuz, it used to be, that 4:04 standard definition television was broadcast in 4:3, 4:05 but they wanted a wider screen, and, so they picked a ratio called 16:9. 4:07 And so when the smartphone industry came about, they realized that they wanted to 4:13 use content, they wanted to leverage content 4:17 from an older, format and an older device. 4:19 And so they allowed the phones to be naturally evolved into the 16:9 format. 4:23 And that's why your phone is the shape it is today. 4:28 It didn't have to be that way, but because people were assuming that 4:32 you will use, old formats on new devices, new devices mimic old shapes. 4:36 So, what's happening since then is that, the explosion of devices that we 4:42 have around us, are now competing, more and more and more of our attention. 4:47 So you go home. 4:51 You sit in front of the TV and you open you laptop. 4:52 And then your phone's next to you. 4:55 All those devices are now competing for attention in a way that 4:57 people who actually invented them had no idea that's how they would occur. 5:00 So if you were of TV manufacturer ten, 20 years ago you 5:04 were saying this is the most important thing in the people's house. 5:08 And so therefore we will have all this fancy 5:11 features on it, and it doesn't need to be interactive. 5:14 It doesn't need all that stuff. 5:16 All of a sudden a smartphone come along and you're like, crap. 5:17 There not watching TV, there doing stuff on their 5:21 phone and kind of watching TV in the background. 5:24 And if you're a content producer who's trying to 5:26 figure out how to capture the attention of an audience. 5:28 You'll do things very differently on a phone than you would do on a TV. 5:31 And so, you need to figure out, as 5:34 a developer or as somebody who creates and works 5:37 with content, how do you create or use 5:40 new formats, to continuously rise above the noise level. 5:42 And part of the, the answer here isn't that there's 5:46 this doom and gloom, a lot of people tend to think 5:50 oh my gosh we can't pay attention anymore, you know, 5:53 we can't figure out how to actually hold a decent conversation. 5:56 Anybody here use Yo? 6:00 [LAUGH] Just see a handful of hands. 6:01 Yo is an app, and for your phone, that allows it to say Yo. 6:04 It's all it does, you press a button to your friend, it just says yo. 6:10 [LAUGH] I'm, I'm not kidding. 6:14 So, if you download Yo the app, there's like 6:16 a million Yos from my friends on my phone. 6:20 Because all you do is press yo, and it says just yo 6:23 on the other side, and then you just say yo them back. 6:25 That's, stuff like that doesn't exist on 6:27 phones, because it's not the nature of phones. 6:30 But it isn't, those apps are not the signal 6:33 of the end of the world, as most people say. 6:35 It's not that the attention pie is shrinking and going away. 6:39 It's that the way we use attention is changing dramatically. 6:43 It is going from this. 6:46 Idea of deep attention to little attention to spreading it out 6:47 across a larger amount of devices and formats, and things like that. 6:52 And so I'll explain that in this talk as well. 6:55 So, let's talk about devices of the past. 6:57 What are these devices? 7:00 Okay. 7:01 So if you wanted to watch a TV, you had a few options. 7:01 You could watch television. 7:04 You could go to a movie theater. 7:05 You could watch a DVD. 7:06 If you wanted to read something, you could pick up a book. 7:07 Each individual activity had a device that allowed 7:10 you to do that kind of activity, okay. 7:15 So it was verticalized. 7:19 If you wanted to listen to music you had radios or CDs. 7:20 And each device was the same thing as a format. 7:23 But today, we've gone to a radically different paradigm. 7:27 Instead of being verticalized. 7:30 Everything can do everything. 7:32 Your laptop can do everything that a book, a radio, 7:35 a newspaper, or movie theater could do, even an ebook. 7:39 I don't know if you guys remember the first or second generation Kindle's 7:42 they could actually read the book out to you in like very robotic voice. 7:45 Like it could actually even read the book out to you. 7:50 As if it were not a book and so 7:53 what's happening is that when devices no longer are 7:56 the same thing as formats, the medium is no 7:59 longer the message, the formats themselves become the message. 8:02 And so what happens when everything can do everything what's the difference? 8:06 Why do you use a laptop versus a tablet? 8:10 Why do you use a tablet versus a phone? 8:13 What is the difference in these devices, because you can do the same thing, right? 8:15 So it comes back to who we are, how 8:20 we interact with the world around us using those devices. 8:25 We use the world, we use the devices, but these formats. 8:27 Is what makes up the network, the connection in between human beings. 8:33 When you go online and you build 8:37 a relationship with someone through the internet, you 8:38 are always using some format of content in 8:40 order to build that relationship with one another. 8:44 Right? 8:47 So when you get on Twitter, you're using 8:47 140 characters, and that is the format of Twitter. 8:49 And every single relationship on the internet is built. 8:51 Using content. 8:55 And that content is subject to the rules 8:57 of the format of that platform that you're using. 8:59 So you ask yourself the question, not that there is a 9:04 single television, but which one of these is your favorite TV? 9:07 If you were born a few years ago and you are a little kid. 9:11 You are given a choice between a tablet iPad mini or phone. 9:15 It's not that each device has a different use, it is that I have a preference. 9:19 I prefer to watch TV on my phone when I'm outside. 9:24 I prefer to watch TV on my iPad, the big one, when I'm on my living room couch. 9:27 So this idea of this verticalized format has gone and 9:32 given way to this idea of more of a bell curve. 9:37 Situational, context relevant, not just what is available to you at that point. 9:40 And what's happening is that media 9:46 consumption, because devices now follow us. 9:48 Because we have a device on us 24/7. 9:51 Media consumption has been going up. 9:54 So if you read this chart,uh, 2020 80% of all media will be digital, duh. 9:55 But you look at that, and you're actually seeing this rapid rise 10:02 of the amount of average hours per week people spend consuming media. 10:05 And also the fragmentation of it. 10:09 And so each one of those fragmentation, in green, and the consumption of 10:11 media hours rising in blue, are both 10:16 opportunities if you're creating content applications websites. 10:19 Because each one of those gives newcomers the ability to actually gain market share. 10:24 Because back in the old days when, you are ha, 10:30 you had to buy a printing press to produce content 10:32 it was very difficult for people like you and me 10:35 to actually capture a share of the imagination of the people. 10:37 The only thing you could do is be a heretic and pin 10:42 you know, your 92 points to a church door and become excommunicated. 10:45 You guys now what I'm talking about. 10:49 The first tweeter, now, somebody called them the 10:53 first tweeter, I thought it was really weird. 10:56 Martin Luther, the guy, not King, the guy who Prot, protestantism separated from 10:59 the Catholic Church, he didn't have a printing press, he almost died for it. 11:05 We don't have to die for the things we write today. 11:09 Because everybody has the power to voice their opinions and 11:12 we feel that it is a human right to do so. 11:15 And what's happening is that as this content consumption 11:18 rises you're kinda seeing where this is headed, right? 11:21 You're seeing that at some point. 11:25 There's 112 hours of waking moments in a day, if you sleep eight hours a day. 11:27 There's 112 of it you can stay awake, and we're approaching the point where you 11:33 will spend every single moment of your waking life looking at some sort of media. 11:37 That's crazy, right? 11:42 Can't really happen. 11:44 Well you're, you're looking at it right now. 11:46 You're looking at PowerPoint. 11:48 What's happening is we are covering more and more 11:49 and more of our visual field with pixels, okay. 11:51 Google glass, yes I have one, is one of those devices that is starting to be. 11:56 Available in one way, shape, or form, that's available to you 24/7. 12:04 You don't even need to take our your phone anymore. 12:07 Interactive displays on billboards, digital media billboards, you 12:10 can see walking down the Las Vegas strip. 12:14 That's again, digital outdoor signage. 12:16 Now what we're seeing is that more and more of what we 12:18 interact with and how we get information is basically following us around. 12:22 And that means that while 100% of our attention isn't paced at media, 12:26 we're also spending a lot of time 12:30 consuming media ambiently, more so than before. 12:32 I'll give you another example. 12:35 How many of you have walked down the street checking your 12:36 email or twitter and listening to music at the same time? 12:39 I have, right? 12:43 And you almost got hit by a car, I bet. 12:44 I broke my phone last night. 12:47 >> Yes, we've also, yes, many people have lost their phones. 12:48 >> [INAUDIBLE]. 12:51 >> And so what happens is that when you 12:51 do that, you're consuming double media at the same time. 12:53 So I don't even know how that's even counted in this graph. 12:56 But according to this graph, at the rate that we're going now, by 2036. 12:59 We're gonna spend 112 hours a week, every single 13:05 moment of our waking day, consuming some sort of media. 13:08 Now that I think about it's not that farfetched. 13:12 So what are we doing to our attention span? 13:14 Okay? 13:18 If I have your attention now it used to be that when you had. 13:18 Box, newsprint, television, and you had to think 13:22 about the media that you're consuming because it 13:25 was passive and you have to actually sit 13:27 there and be active about consuming the content. 13:29 Your intention looked more like a Chicago style deep dish pie, small, 13:32 tall, intense, thick, you have to sit there and actually consume it. 13:37 Today, attention looks more like this. 13:42 It's what I call a thin-crust, attention span. 13:44 It's not that there's tons of attention you need to pay, you're 13:47 always paying some attention, throughout the day, to some form of media. 13:50 If you're on your Twitter right now 13:54 tweeting about this, I'm totally cool with that. 13:55 Because I know that chances are you're tweeting about what I'm 13:58 saying, and I'm using this as a way to market, my speech. 14:00 Right? 14:03 This idea of, I'm listening to something, I'm also 14:04 doing something else, this thin attention span, is actually 14:06 something we can leverage to continue to push our 14:10 business, our entrepreneurship, and our apps down the road. 14:13 Because we're competing at the end of the day against this. 14:16 This is what I call the kitten photo test. 14:19 It is the most abundant content in the universe. 14:21 [LAUGH] Okay, it also goes for puppies. 14:23 If you have a puppy or if you have a kitten 14:26 you've probably got an iPhone full of photos of these animals, okay. 14:28 They're actually quite good from a quality perspective 14:31 photos of puppies and kittens are actually really good. 14:36 Why is that? 14:39 Why are these pieces of content actually quite good. 14:40 We have been spending as a humanity 10,000 years breeding cats and dogs. 14:42 To make them cuter and more adorable. 14:46 So, it comes to me as no surprise that when we see puppy, we're like, 14:49 awe, because we've been manufacturing and breeding a 14:53 weapon of cuteness [LAUGH], for all this time. 14:57 And so when you're on the internet and a kitten photo is just one click 15:00 away, you have to ask yourself, is my content, is my service, is my product. 15:03 Good enough to compete against these damn kittens. 15:08 [LAUGH] This is the minimum valuable viable like 15:12 product for the internet, a photo of a kitten. 15:14 You better be better than that and its hard. 15:17 And so, that's a lot of pressure on us to actually succeed in 15:20 this world were such a high quality content can be just one click away. 15:24 And a lot of it is this idea that we have 15:28 to compete against it, we have to compete against one another. 15:32 And sometimes you feel the pressure, maybe you don't. 15:35 But at the end of the day, more and more people are entering this space. 15:37 And they're being drawn by the idea 15:40 that you could have creative freedom, and they're 15:44 being pushed in here because they realize that 15:46 if they don't do it, somebody else will. 15:48 But at the same time people are kind of risk averse. 15:50 And the, and the risks I hear are that you don't 15:52 want to have a huge visible failure at your company when 15:55 you went out on a limb to say, you know I 15:58 wanna go create an app for Google Glass and it doesn't work. 16:01 Or no one uses it. 16:04 Or that you don't have a lot of constraint, a lot resources so you 16:06 actually can't do much even if you did want to do well, there's a lot 16:09 of risk in that you might be able, you might not be able to 16:12 pull it off, because you don't have the people, or the expertise to do so. 16:15 And so this is the stuff that people kinda way in the back of their heads as they 16:18 think about putting content for this world where there's 16:22 tons of different formats competing on tons of different devices. 16:25 And so going back to the idea of formats, let me tell you how they've evolved. 16:29 So in 2005 this was watching movies on an airplane. 16:34 The guy on the bottom left, he is so 16:37 bored and he doesn't wanna watch that tiny little 16:41 6-inch TV screen, you know, 8 feet away from 16:43 him that he'd rather play a game of chess. 16:46 On his Windows Vista. 16:49 [LAUGH] All right? 16:51 This is 2005 and this was state of the art format for watching movies on an airplane. 16:53 Fast forward 5 years, everybody has their own screens. 17:00 Everybody has their own screens, however, this 17:03 is actually not the equilibrium that people really 17:06 want, because the content's not right, and the 17:09 T, and the screen quality is not right. 17:11 Today, airlines are practically giving up and loaning you iPads, because 17:12 they realize that this is the right format that people want. 17:17 This is the right form factor that people 17:21 want for watching their movies when they fly. 17:24 There's another example here. 17:28 This is a nice room, nice flat screen TV in the middle. 17:31 If you bought a new TV you actually, 17:35 most people don't change the room around it, right? 17:38 You buy a new TV it goes in the same living room, 17:40 so if you look at the resolution difference as being standard, DVD, 17:44 High Def, versus this new thing that's coming out called 4k Ultra 17:47 High Def, that's actually the two 17:50 scale comparison between those different formats. 17:53 DVD has a tiny amount of resolution, compared to 4K ultra. 17:56 And so, if you bought a new TV today, 17:59 and if you bought a, an average American television. 18:02 You're probably buying a 46'' high definition TV, and 18:05 you're sitting about nine feet away from that TV. 18:08 Right? 18:11 If you go home and measure, you're 18:12 probably nine feet, plus or minus three feet. 18:13 Okay? 18:16 So if you're that distance away, let's say this 18:16 is how your 46, 46 inch HDTV looks like. 18:20 If you went to 4K, you have four times the resolution at the same distance. 18:23 Four times the resolution. 18:29 You can be looking at so many more pixels, it's, it'll be beautiful! 18:30 It'll be amazing! 18:33 Except for you to actually tell the quality difference in 18:35 the picture, that TV would have to be 140 inches big. 18:39 I kid you not, you actually cannot see the pixels 18:45 when you're ninne feet away from a high def TV. 18:47 You really can't see the pixels, when you're looking at 18:50 a 4k TV nine feet away, that's 50, 60 inch. 18:53 And so what do you do with, if you have a hundred 18:56 and forty inch TV, what do you do with all that extra space? 18:58 It's like your living room has turned into IMAX. 19:01 What do you do with that extra space? 19:03 Well if you notice, you can actually put more of the picture in there. 19:06 So give us another decade or so and as TV technology 19:10 gets cheaper and cheaper we're gonna buy bigger and bigger TVs. 19:14 Because that's what we want in our living room. 19:17 We wanna cover more of our space with pixels, so we can 19:19 control it and hope that there's new formats of content being created. 19:22 And if I'm creating content for a 140 inch TV, versus a 19:28 46 inch TV, I wanna give you movies that look like this. 19:32 I wanna give you more of the picture. 19:34 But did you notice that something is missing here? 19:36 This is that image, same image with that 46 inch TV that I showed you versus 140. 19:39 That house isn't there any more. 19:45 So, if I'm giving you the same movie but one 19:48 is for regular high def versus one is ultra high def. 19:51 Why does that TV not exist? 19:55 Why did that TV? 19:56 I'm sorry, why does that, why did that house- 19:57 Disappear from the screen. 20:00 It turns out that if you're sitting nine feet from a 20:02 140 inch TV, the corners of your screen are actually peripheral vision. 20:05 You actually do not consume that data. 20:09 You're actually looking at the center of your television, and stuff on 20:11 the outer edge of it is actually being filled by your memory. 20:14 And if you have a plot point during that movie. 20:17 And it's in the periphery. 20:21 And if people miss it, you didn't get the story. 20:22 And so, you now have to think about 20:25 re-editing your movie, so that when a critical thing 20:26 happens, it doesn't happen in the corner of 20:29 your screen, which is totally fine to do today. 20:31 What people have to do is when 20:35 they think about different formats and different devices, 20:36 they have to re-think the environment that 20:39 the people are using to consume that content. 20:41 Here's another example. 20:45 Be, before I go there, does anybody know the biggest trend that's 20:46 been happening to sound and audio and music over the last ten years? 20:49 It's called loudness. 20:54 And the idea is that sound engineers are actually modifying 20:56 music, so that it feels louder, that there's more bass. 20:59 And part of the reason is that most consumption is 21:03 not happening with earphones that cannot produce that kind of sound. 21:05 And so, what happened is that records 21:09 are mastered differently, because they're much more analog. 21:11 And people seem to people spend lots of money 21:14 on speakers and they sit in their living room. 21:16 There's no ambient noise and they're listening music, and it's not as 21:17 loud as the MP3s that you buy, which are engineered very differently. 21:20 Because they assume that you're in a mobile environment where 21:24 there is earphones and lots of stuff are going on. 21:28 So this is already happening today that people are rethinking about 21:31 content to fit the world that we live in, and so 21:33 hypothetically speaking, if you're a football fan, you can actually fit 21:36 four high def broadcasts into one 4K ultra high def TV. 21:41 But the problem of that is that, while 21:46 we can consume lots of visual field information 21:48 at the same time, we can't listen to 21:50 different streams of audio at the same time. 21:53 We can parallel task vision, but we can only single task audio. 21:55 So let's say you have a Kinect, like I have an Xbox One, it is 22:00 actually an amazing entertainment device, you can 22:04 actually talk to it and say things like. 22:05 Xbox, I wanna watch The Walking Dead, and it'll figure it all out. 22:07 And what it can do is, it recognizes me versus my wife. 22:12 And so when I sit down and actually look up it 22:15 knows that I'm looking at a certain corner of the screen. 22:17 And so you can live in an environment where you can watch four games at 22:19 the same time, and merely by the tilt of your head, the audio social will change. 22:22 Pretty amazing, huh? 22:29 This is just the beginning of how our environment will change. 22:30 How the devices around us as we cover more and 22:35 more of our world with pixels will continue to evolve. 22:37 And if you're an advertiser and you're advertising on TV, you are 22:40 screwed, because the moment your ad comes on, what do you do? 22:44 [LAUGH] So let's talk about formats in real life. 22:47 This is me adopting this theory that I'm talking to you about to the world of news. 22:54 So when I co-founded Circa with Matt and, and Arsenio the idea was that 22:59 the way you, you, you read news, it's been the same since the 19th century. 23:04 Somebody writes an article, somebody edits it and they publish it 23:09 either on digital or on print, and it's delivered to you. 23:13 And then they repeat the cycle over and over again. 23:16 And the idea was that on mobile devices, we can really get out of that paradigm and 23:19 find ways to structure news in a way that's 23:23 much more easy to read and it's noise free. 23:25 And so, we built a company around that and it's going pretty darn well. 23:29 And so, if I"m embracing a new format, let's talk about old formats. 23:33 So you can see on the top corner of 23:39 these screens you see paperback, ebooks, and things like that. 23:41 But if you keep going down the family tree of 23:43 different formats, you see the word that's highlighted, it says scroll. 23:46 How many of you have used the scroll in the last 30 days? 23:50 You guys are all a bunch of liars, you know that? 23:53 This is a receipt. 23:58 A receipt is rolled off of a scroll and 24:00 they tear a corner and they give it to you. 24:03 We've all used scrolls in probably tha last 24 hours. 24:06 What happens to old formats that have been 24:10 successful is not that they go and disappear. 24:11 They become extremely specialized. 24:15 So for example, records. 24:17 Record sales have been going up, in triple digits year 24:19 over year, because for some reason, people have refound the 24:23 joy of actually listening to a full album in an 24:28 environment, where you do nothing else other than listen to music. 24:32 Cuz if you think about the amount of time 24:36 you listen to music, you're not listening to music. 24:37 You're doing work. 24:39 Right. 24:40 And what's happening is that old formats don't die, they just find 24:40 a different niche, and so newspapers are not going to go away. 24:44 They are just going to become something different. 24:47 So what happens to new formats? 24:51 alright so here's the future devices that are definitely coming smart watches 24:52 apple TV's, Xbox, Google Glass, Facebook, HiDef TV, 3D printing. 24:58 3D printing's on there, because it turns out that, okay here's Facebook. 25:04 So, if you are looking at Facebook, and you've got 3D vision. 25:09 For those of you, wondering why I am 25:12 calling this Facebook it's because Facebook bought Oculus Rift. 25:13 Okay. 25:16 If you don't know that. 25:16 I'm so sorry. 25:17 You need to get on the Internet a little bit more often. 25:18 But, right now, we think of Oculus Rift as a way to play games. 25:20 And the only reason we think that is because, the only mass medium 25:25 that is available to us, that is a fully 3D environment, is gaming. 25:28 There really isn't much else. 25:32 But it turns out that once this format of gaming in Oculus Rift, gaming as 25:34 a last-generation format being adapted to a new-generation 25:39 device, other things will start to come up. 25:42 Other things like training, right? 25:45 Other things like therapy. 25:48 So I just met a guy who was working on fixing people's visual 25:51 I forgot what it was called, but it's a, it's a, people can't see straight. 25:57 It's not cross eyed, but basically they have muscle de, degeneration in one 26:02 eye and he was using Oculus Rift to help people actually correct that. 26:05 Right? 26:10 This is just the beginning of new formats and new frontiers. 26:10 Because a brand new device has allowed us to put human beings in a new context. 26:14 And even going back to analog printing, like physical devices. 26:19 How many of you have actually seen that commercial, late night? 26:24 Where you like, you can cook bacon, but on a microwave. 26:27 Oh yeah, you know what I'm talking about, right. 26:31 So, you buy this little plastic device which looks like 26:33 a little tree, you hang pieces of bacon in it, and 26:35 you put it in the microwave, and like 60 seconds later 26:37 all the fat drips out, and you get the bacon out. 26:40 Okay. 26:42 You just spent 20 bucks, and 30 26:43 minutes watching a infomercial about a plastic tree. 26:45 Hey, that's all it is, it's just a piece of plastic. 26:49 Instead of doing that, what you could do is in a world 26:52 where objects, and printed objects can be transmitted over the inter tubes. 26:56 Instead of actually asking somebody to make it somewhere 27:01 else and ship it to your house for $20. 27:04 You could actually have like Oscar Mayer Bacon sponsor of the design. 27:06 And you download it, for free. 27:10 But when it's printed at your house, it says Oscar Mayer on it. 27:12 You just purchased some advertising, in lieu of purchasing a physical product. 27:15 You're giving your time and attention to having something in your house, that you 27:20 can look at and say, okay, I get it, there's a sponsorship on it. 27:24 But instead of paying 20 bucks to have a plastic thing 27:27 sent to my house, I'll just print it instead, for free. 27:29 We've now started to turn physical objects into digital media. 27:33 And so, what is happening is, in the first 27:39 generation of like maker bots and, and, 3D printing. 27:41 You're seeing a lot of stuff used for education, and just for shits and giggles. 27:45 I went to a friend's house, friend's office in Chicago. 27:49 They've had a replicator for a long time, and I asked them of all 27:51 the stuff in this room, give me one thing that is actually practically useful. 27:54 And they spent like 20 minutes looking for something, and they couldn't find one. 27:58 Right. 28:01 It's for fun, and that's great. 28:02 People experimenting. 28:03 But as the second generation of 3D printing comes along. 28:05 We're gonna start actually finding real uses for, and again each 28:08 generation of new devices are creating new opportunities for formats to 28:11 evolve and they evolve in a way that is not expected, 28:16 Okay, you didn't expect cats to go from saber tooth tigers. 28:21 To pictures with captions, but that's what happened, 28:27 because we, shaped the world around us into 28:29 the most pleasurable thing we could find and 28:32 what is happening is that these stages of 28:36 innovation and evolution has been repeating itself over 28:38 a long time, and so what happens is, 28:40 when a new device comes along, what we do is, we adapt old format into new device. 28:42 And then a handful of creative people, creative people decide that 28:47 they want to embrace this concept and actually create something new. 28:50 And, then, when those leaders have actually 28:53 come up with some few things that all 28:55 of us, it captures our imagination, now we say, you know what, we can go mainstream. 28:57 We can actually start releasing products and platforms that embrace this idea. 29:03 So, is there a such thing as bad format? 29:07 You guys have seen, yes, somebody said yes. 29:12 Okay, lets talk about this. 29:13 Alright, you have an iPhone and you want to take a video. 29:15 You're that guy. 29:19 Right? 29:20 You've seen that video? 29:20 You all hate that video. 29:22 Right? 29:23 It's terrible. 29:24 It's like this guys. 29:24 So there's even a PSA that's got almost five million views 29:26 on on YouTube that tells you about the vertical video syndrome. 29:29 I'd argue that actually there's no bad format, 29:32 this is like old formats not really dying. 29:35 There isn't that there's a bad format, it's just that we 29:37 haven't created the products that leverage that format and those uses. 29:40 And you can, and this is the case in 29:44 Vennio who actually supports 9 by 16 vertical video formats, 29:46 but you can actually make beautiful products, beautiful images by 29:50 rethinking what was given to us by the last generation. 29:54 What we're trying to create is different formats for different environments. 30:00 And so, let's take real time content for an example. 30:03 What are the different formats on a real-time, audience? 30:07 So you have, one to viral which is 30:10 like me, media stunts, PR stunts, things like that. 30:12 And on the bottom you have like one to 30:16 one, interpersonal which is like Tweeting somebody at customer service. 30:17 Like different formats of content, different formats 30:21 of interaction depending on the audience size. 30:24 And in this real time audience pyramid as the amount of audience scales up on one 30:27 side, going from one to one, to one to few, one to many, one to viral. 30:31 on the other side the amount of content actually decreases 30:35 as you go up or increases as you go down. 30:38 As though each format has a different use. 30:41 It has a different audience. 30:43 The scale of audience is different depending on how it 30:44 is being created and how difficult it is to create. 30:48 And so when you are thinking about creating content, 30:50 you have to think about if I do this 30:52 how many people does it reach and what type 30:54 of interaction am I going to have with them? 30:56 And so in the future. 30:58 There's a lot of constraints. 31:01 There's so much fragmentation. 31:02 We feel frustrated by all the work we have to do with a 31:03 little bit of resources that we have and the little bit of time. 31:06 For me, when a Cheeseburger, when we work with constraints, we talk about creativity 31:09 not coming from the lack of constraint, we talk about creativity as a way. 31:14 That frees us from the constraint. 31:19 That we can use to actually create something new that didn't exist prior 31:21 that is capturing the imagination for at least a brief moment of time. 31:26 The Yo app that I was actually talking about, it seems like such a stupid idea. 31:29 Press somebody's name and it just says Yo, that's all you can do. 31:33 Yet at the same time millions of people are starting to 31:35 use it, they just raised a million dollars of venture capital. 31:38 That's a whole other story. 31:41 Maybe that is the end of the universe. 31:43 But, if you are do not take those risks, if you do not figure out how 31:44 to leverage these new devices to create formats 31:51 that work for that environment, somebody else will. 31:53 For example, 6-Second Stories. 31:57 Who knew that we would be able to actually use 31:59 six seconds worth of time to tell entire stories online. 32:02 Or even fifteen seconds on Instagram, or what have you. 32:06 Small amounts of times, which we thought were barriers to telling 32:09 stories, are no longer barriers to how we tell stories today. 32:12 Because, it used to be that when your grandpa told you a story. 32:16 Ended up beginning, a middle, and end of it, right? 32:19 It feels like like let me tell you about the time 32:22 when I was a kid, like halfway through, maybe like halfway through 32:24 the intro you're like, is it,is it rude to take out my 32:26 phone and check my email, cuz I know where this is going. 32:29 And your grandpa grew up in a world where 32:33 formats of content were suppose to be narrative arts. 32:35 They were suppose to have a beginning, middle and end. 32:38 And so grandpa, that's all he knew. 32:40 But today, we have storytelling that assumes the context that we all know it. 32:43 So, for example, still a better love story than Twilight. 32:52 >> [LAUGH] >> From the movie Castaway. 32:54 So if you laugh at this joke. 32:58 I know that you and I know at least three things in common, right? 33:00 That there's a movie called Castaway where Tom Hanks 33:04 has a love affair with a volley ball, okay? 33:06 [LAUGH] Second, there's a movie called Twilight. 33:08 And, three, everybody loves to hate on Twilight. 33:11 I told you this, in this single image 33:14 microformat, because I knew that you would know that. 33:16 What we were doing is we're adapting this 33:19 type of story telling based on our history. 33:22 Mass media has allowed us to understand that we have very, very shared narratives. 33:24 People who are born in the early days of mass media do 33:30 not make the assumption that you know the same things that they do. 33:33 And so their story telling is different. 33:36 So I'll give you another example, this is, this is a, 33:39 a format of content adapted from a long long time ago, OK. 33:41 I know it doesn't look like it. 33:46 Father? 33:48 Yes my son? 33:49 I myth you. 33:53 [LAUGH] OK. 33:53 Simple Mythbusters. 33:54 Joke that's been said for many many years. 33:57 This is not format it actually originated in. 34:00 It looks like this, an image with three different, 34:02 a single image with three different sub-images in it, okay? 34:06 This is called a triptych, this is also a triptych from 1415, right? 34:09 But it's gone, it goes from left to right. 34:15 And so top to bottom, why is it that 34:17 triptychs of the modern age go top to bottom? 34:19 Because we've all learned how to scroll. 34:22 It's the same format except new generations used new styles 34:25 and new device contexts to create new uses for them. 34:30 So what we're saying is by telling these 34:34 jokes, by telling these, context rich jokes that. 34:36 If i tell you must know all the concepts around it, if you understand 34:40 this, you understand me, you get this, you get who I am as well. 34:43 And some final words before I actually get to Q & A, if you want to 34:48 create a new content format, you have to pick the device that it's gonna live on. 34:52 Right? 34:57 And we all kinda start with mobile, but that doesn't actually have to be the case. 34:57 Whether it be 3D printing or Oculus Rift or, 35:00 tablets or phones, you have to start thinking about the 35:05 world that is actually going to come before us, 35:07 cuz it will take you some time to build it. 35:10 But if you want to create a new way, a new format, you have to build product. 35:12 You have to build a product that allows people to understand what it's 35:16 for, how to create it, how to share it and how to consume it. 35:20 And this new, new product will teach 35:24 people the joy and the amazingness of actually 35:27 using that format just as Vine and Makerbot 35:30 did with six second videos and 3D printing. 35:33 And so if you're doing new devices creating new formats. 35:36 You've gotta use environments. 35:41 You have to understand the environment that the product is being used. 35:44 If at some day we actually can actually created 3D 35:47 printers that are mobile I guarantee the things we create 35:50 on a mobile printing 3D printing device is gonna be 35:53 very different than the stuff that we use at home. 35:56 And so these environments matter. 35:58 And you can't just take an old format and apply it to new. 36:01 You have to rethink how it's used just as that 600 year 36:03 old triptik was sideways, who had decided that triptiks are now vertical. 36:07 And then you have to actually create 36:11 answers because you have to solve people's problems. 36:13 You don't just create formats for the hell of it. 36:16 Every format that is successful actually solves 36:19 a problem when it comes to content consumption. 36:21 Thank you very much and I'll take your questions, and- 36:24 >> [APPLAUSE] >> Yeah. 36:28 >> So who's got a question for Ben? 36:34 Come on, somebody. 36:38 Alight, here we are. 36:39 >> I can't see. 36:40 So I noticed you equated, size with resolution, but that's not always true. 36:43 So why did you go there? 36:48 >> I'm sorry, equate size with resolution>> yeah 36:50 >> yeah, so, you can like I said, buy a 4k tv that is 46 inches big. 36:52 However you won't see a difference, right, cuz it's so far 36:58 away from you on average, cuz you're sitting 6 to 12 ft. 37:00 away. 37:03 And so the nature of television, is that bigger is better. 37:03 And the moment you start to have a reason to buy a 37:07 bigger TV, because it's cheaper, it has a better resolution, you will. 37:09 So eventually we're gonna end up in a world that you have 140 inch. 37:12 TV screen. 37:15 >> To, to appreciate it. 37:16 >> That's right. 37:18 >> All right. 37:18 Thank You. 37:19 >> And so when you have a 140 inch. 37:19 TV. 37:20 Since you're sitting nine feet away you can't see the edges very well. 37:20 So as a content creator we have to start thinking about that. 37:23 Crap, this is a new problem that didn't exist before. 37:26 >> Go, good question. 37:29 Thank you. 37:30 >> Anybody else? 37:31 I've got one. 37:34 >> Mm-hm. 37:34 >> Ben, you've got a Google Glass. 37:34 What combination of audio visual context is gonna lead 37:36 the to the, to a new format for Google Glass? 37:42 >> For Google Glass, so what, what's really interesting about Google Glass is 37:44 that, because they released it to consumers 37:48 we started thinking about it like consumers. 37:52 So right now, Google Glass is actually, that's why 37:54 the whole glass whole thing was kind of funny because. 37:56 You've got all these people running around with cameras 37:59 on their heads and they don't really realize what's happening. 38:00 They started actually releasing Google Glass to industries, specific industries. 38:03 I met this guy at a different conference. 38:06 He was a doctor at six different expeditions to climb Mount Everest. 38:10 And he was there when one of the biggest storms happened. 38:16 And he, you know, helped to save a lot of people's lives. 38:19 And, the, and, NASA contacted him and said we'd like 38:21 to figure out how to actually do surgery and do medical, 38:25 treatments for people on Mars. 38:31 Right? 38:34 So imagine Mars. 38:35 You have eight minutes of delay for any amount of communication. 38:36 How does a astronaut who's not a doctor perform surgery, right? 38:39 And so, he was actually looking at Google Glass and trying 38:45 to figure out, like, how do I instruct people and how do 38:47 I make instruction relevent to the context of the surgery because what 38:51 it you open up somebody and find something that you didn't expect? 38:55 Can the Google glasses actually recognize different body parts. 38:58 And different scenarios that should do that. 39:01 And so, we're trying to figure out, like. 39:03 Google created a hammer, and we're all trying 39:05 to kind of look for a nail right now. 39:08 And so, and that's the environment we live in with Google glass. 39:09 Is that, it's a tool without a function at this point. 39:12 >> Yeah. 39:16 Excellent. 39:16 Anybody else? 39:17 Everyone, oh, there is one over there, so everyone will have 39:20 to wait before the free booze at the pool, no pressure. 39:23 >> Yeah, I guess a couple of questions are all 39:34 of your websites still running WordPress, this is my first one. 39:36 Let me answer that >> Sure. 39:40 >> We moved off of WordPress about three years ago. 39:42 We were one of the world's largest 39:45 customers of WordPr, WordPress, but we weren't blogging. 39:47 So we had this kind of problem between the format 39:50 that WordPress was pushing, which is kind of longer form, more context rich, versus 39:55 smaller, Kind of device agnostic that we were headed, it was actually 40:00 really, really expensive to get off word press, I'll 40:05 be honest, we probably ended up spending twice the 40:07 money that we thought we were gonna spend with 40:10 WordPress, and so WordPress is a fantastic product for 40:11 content management systems, for rich content management systems. 40:15 We were trying to design something different so we moved off of it. 40:18 Where are you, on square space now? 40:21 Or, something else? 40:22 >> no. 40:23 We actually built our own. 40:23 >> Okay. 40:24 >> Yeah. 40:25 So, I think at one point, we were, 20% of all wordpress.com traffic. 40:25 Yeah, that was a lot. 40:31 >> Alright, so my second question is, can you explain some hurdles that you had 40:33 in trying to develop a business model that 40:37 was, And just developed around 100% ad revenue. 40:39 >> Yeah, so, the business model was really interesting because in the early 40:44 days of the company the only mission was to live to fight another day. 40:47 Like, I wanted to come to work and actually have 40:51 enough money to keep working and so, we did like everything. 40:53 Like ad networks, we sold t-shirts, we 40:56 sold stickers, like we sold fridge magnets with. 40:59 Low speak on it, and, and then what 41:02 we found was that despite we sold virtual currency. 41:05 Like, it was crazy. 41:08 We tried everything. 41:10 And, what, one of the things that we found was 41:11 that, advertising kept on growing, even though we've neglected it. 41:13 Like, we would do everything in our power to view 41:16 everything else, and then ads, ad dollars kept on growing. 41:17 And, and one of the reason was, was that because we 41:20 were coming out of a recession, that ad dollars would naturally grow. 41:22 And so we ended up actually folding almost everything that we 41:25 did, including the book business just to focus, to concentrate on advertising. 41:28 Which temporarily lowered our revenues but that was kind of the intent. 41:33 Yeah. 41:37 Any other questions? 41:39 And advertising by the way, keep thinking of questions but, advertising 41:41 is actually an area that is incredibly slow to adapt new formats. 41:44 If you look at the state of the art on mobile 41:48 phones right now and mobile advertising it is terrible because what they 41:49 did is they took punch the monkey from the banner ads and 41:52 put it on your phone where you can't even see the monkey. 41:55 How can you punch it? 41:58 [LAUGH] So that's how we usually start a 41:59 new generation of devices but, we're starting to see 42:03 mobile adds kind of come up and, and, and 42:06 be more innovative about the environment that it's in. 42:09 Such as having knowing it's location, right? 42:11 But we're just barely getting started there. 42:14 >> Here 42:16 we go, one in the middle. 42:19 >> So you said that you know the attention 42:26 span is turning into the thin crust or whatever, 42:28 >> Yeah,. 42:31 Who is that You know I guess effecting society as 42:32 one of the people that promotes this sort of behavior. 42:35 Come on man I'm just doing what people want. 42:39 So it's true I actually one of the challenges that 42:43 we have about this dialogue of what's happened with the world. 42:47 Is that we tend to look at it from like old timers' perspective. 42:50 Like, let's face it, we're all getting older, none of us are getting younger. 42:53 And the world that we're actually leave, leaving for 42:56 the people who come after us, is a world where 42:58 you have 112 hours a, a week of media, Where 43:01 they are surrounded by devices and communication all the time. 43:05 And they're actually being asked to create product and. 43:08 And business and services during that time, and so while we sit there 43:11 and go boy in the old days I could actually read a book 43:15 without interruption, we're leaving them a world where they have to deal with 43:18 distractions all the time and live to learn in a thin crust world. 43:22 And that's okay. 43:27 Like, I actually think it's going to be alright. 43:28 So while it was beneficial for our generation 43:30 to know how to deal with attention spans. 43:33 In a, in a 90 percent of the attention span 43:35 was deep maybe it's gonna be the other way around. 43:37 Where it's really helpful to have 90 percent of our 43:40 attention span be thin and only 10 percent be deep so. 43:42 >> Any others? 43:46 OK well then please let's put our hands 43:51 together for Ben Hunt that was really, really interesting. 43:53 [APPLAUSE] 43:57