On with Kara Swisher - Why Tubi CEO Anjali Sud Says Free Is the Future of Streaming

Episode Date: December 7, 2024

How does an ad-based streamer compete with subscription-based models like Netflix, Hulu, Max, and all the rest? By charging nothing. At least that’s what Tubi is doing. And despite being seemingly less prestigious than premium streamers, Tubi is used by millions of Americans and outranks Peacock, Max, Paramount Plus, and Apple TV+ in total viewing time. For those who are fatigued by subscriptions fees and monoculture viewing, Tubi offers an enormous catalog of nostalgia and “newstalgia” movies, hours of bingeable classics, over 250 live channels, plus Tubi originals – all at no cost to viewers. So why aren’t more people talking about it? Kara sits down with Tubi CEO Anjali Sud in this special episode of On presented by e.l.f. Cosmetics to talk about Tubi’s appeal to cord-cutters and cord-nevers; how niche-specific fans help inform Tubi content; why Sud thinks Tubi can democratize storytelling and create space for emerging filmmakers; and how she came to be one of few female CEOs in tech. This interview was taped live at the Whitney Museum in partnership with e.l.f cosmetics as a part of their campaign to increase representation and diversity in boardrooms. Find out more here: https://www.elfbeauty.com/changing-the-board-game/so-many-dicks  Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on Instagram and TikTok @onwithkaraswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for On with Kara Swisher comes from Elf Beauty. If you ever wondered what happens when a boardroom is a majority women, look no further than Elf Beauty. Out of about 4,100 U.S. publicly traded companies, Elf is the only one to have a corporate board of directors that is 78% women and 44% diverse. They're making the best of beauty accessible to every eye, lip face, and changing the board game while they do it. Visit elf.com backslash change the board game to learn more. Hi everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Anjali Sood, the CEO of Tubi.

Tubi is a free streaming platform that millions of Americans use, but nobody seems to know about. I have used Tubi many times because I like a lot of old shows and they have every one of them on it and you don't have to pay another streaming fee. It's a fascinating company and Azure is doing some really interesting stuff there with AI, with creators and their broader approach to streaming in general. It's completely unlike the typical streamers that come to mind and trust me, you're going to wish you knew about it sooner. She was the CEO of Vimeo before Tubi, so she has a lot of knowledge about video streaming

and user-generated content and also reaching more diverse audiences. Also, she knows a lot about the fans. Anjali and I talk about all of that, plus her remarkable career path in this incredible conversation brought to you by E.L.F. Cosmetics. I recently partnered with E.L.F., which, if you didn't know, stands for eyes, lip, and face. Elf found that there are almost as many men named Richard, Rich, and Dick on company boards as there are Black or Asian women and twice as many as Latinas, which is insane.

So Elf is trying to change that, and I fully support it. This is something I've been reporting on for years and years and constantly advocating for, so it was kind of a no-brainer for me. Plus, they make some really great and affordable products and I think that's really important. I really like their primer that I put on. It's very nice. It's very nice. And again, it's inexpensive.

Makeup shouldn't have to be expensive to be good and I think sometimes it is. And Anjali was the perfect guest for this event. She's one of the very few female tech CEOs. She's innovative and smart, and we had a really fantastic conversation, and I think she's definitely one to watch. We taped our conversation live at the Whitney Museum in New York City.

I hope you enjoy it. Hi everyone, welcome to Elf Beauty's Too Many Dicks in the Boardroom. Thank you for being here. So it's a perfect topic for me. When I ran the All Things D website, which is an entrepreneurial effort that Walt Mossberg and I did, I was editor. I also wrote a lot. And so, I assigned myself a story about the lack of women and diverse people in boardrooms. And I focused in on Twitter, which used to be called Twitter. Now it's called a Nazi porn bar. But in any case, they had a board of white men.

And so I wrote a lead, and I used to do this a lot. I had the men and no women of Facebook at one point, before they got Cheryl, who apparently counts for six women, and did a bunch of these stories just trying to call attention to this issue. And especially at Twitter, which had a very diverse audience, an astonishingly diverse audience. If you looked at it in every single way, age, race, gender, everything else.

And you didn't have to necessarily replicate that, but it was an astonishing thing to have white men of the same age only on the board, and especially because this company continually drove itself into a wall. This has never been a successful company. And so I wrote a lead that I think was the best thing I've ever, I should have retired immediately after writing it. But the lead was, here on the board of Twitter with three Peters and a dick.

And then I went on from there. It was a penis joke. It was a good one. It's good. It's a good one, yeah? Right? And when I had it, most editors, if I say it was at the Wall Street Journal, would have not let me do it.

But I said to the editor, Kara Swisher, what do you think of this lead? And she said, that is brilliant. Push published, just like that. So I did. And the CEO, Dick Costello, who's the Dick in reference, called me and he goes, okay, first of all, that was funny, because he was a former stand-up comic. And he said, but it's unfair.

And I said, why is that? Why is it that you have 10 men of the same type and the same names in the boardroom? I don't understand why your company is sucking so bad. So it can't be that they're doing a good job, this board. And I don't understand why you have a diverse audience and you have nobody who represents anybody or has any point of view, even political point of view,

they're all the same politics, which is to say zero, zero values. And I, I'm sorry, it matters. So we went back and forth and he said, well, you know, we have standards. And I said to him, and he's one of the better ones, let me just say, I said to him, you know, the only time you mentioned standards, that you have standards you have to meet, is when it's a woman or a person of color or someone that's different

from you. And I said, so I think your company is failing badly. Your stock has never been lifted. And if your standards are to suck, you're doing a great job. And then I hung up. So that's my Dicks in the Boardroom story. I continue to write about it. It's critically important to have a diverse group of people

that reflects your audience, that has different points of view, that can then get along and make decisions together. The reason the internet is not safe is because the people who designed it never felt unsafe a day in their lives. I will say that over and over again. So anyway, so today I'm talking to Anjali Sood. I'm very excited because I've wanted to talk to you

for a long time, you're the perfect person for this. She is the CEO of Tubi. She's not only shifting the gender balance in the C-suite, probably one of the few women, it's a very small group of people right now, maybe in a handful of women CEOs in tech and media, but also taking on the tech giants with new concepts of streaming, including

really innovative uses of AI, which I want to talk about. Anjali, welcome. Thanks for being with us in this special episode of On, presented by Elf Cosmetics. So you've been CEO of Tubi for a little over a year, correct? Before that, you were at Vimeo. I covered when that was founded many years ago, where you rose from the ranks of head of marketing to CEO. I'm going to talk about the Too Many Dicks problem in a minute, but I first want to talk about 2B. So for those who don't know it, and you may not know it, it's one of the biggest streaming services there is that people don't know about. So talk about 2B and explain your elevator pitch if you're explaining it to people.

Yeah, well, thanks again for having me, Kara. I'm excited to be here and to talk about all the topics that you just raised. So I didn't know Tubi a year and a half ago. And the more I learned about it, the more excited I got. And the reason that I joined is because I actually think it really represents a lot of the elements of the future of entertainment. Tubi is the most watched free movie and TV service

in America. We have over 80 million monthly active viewers, and it's a totally free service for consumers. The way we make money is from advertising. And so, you know, sort of think about YouTube for movies and TV shows, or if you think about how much we are entertained on social media or online gaming, it's the same model, that you just open the app and you can start watching.

We have the world's largest collection of movies and TV shows. We're doing a lot of stuff to bring unique stories from unique storytellers and more diversity into Hollywood. But I think what's so interesting about Tooby is it really is representing where viewers are going. What we see from the next generation and from all of us is a bit of fatigue with streaming services today. You've got a paradox of choice, you've got

too many scripts, subscriptions, tiers, prices are increasing, contents feeling less differentiated. And at the same time, we're all craving more authenticity and the speed of culture is moving as fast as TikTok. And so what I think 2B is really trying to do is listen to what audiences want and move in a very agile and real way to give them more and more of that,

all very much through the lens of storytelling. And, you know, for me, you know, coming for me, coming in a little over a year ago, I definitely had a thesis that now was the time when streaming, you could have an upstart that could maybe compete with some of these big media companies. Which were spending billions of dollars. We're spending billions of dollars, which we are not spending.

And I'll tell you, in the last year plus, more competition has entered the space, particularly in big tech. And even then, Tubi is gaining momentum. You outrank Peacock, Max, Paramount Plus, Apple TV Plus in total viewing time, only YouTube, which I think is probably your closest competitor, Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu are still ahead, which is kind of fascinating. So you have this catalog.

We'll talk about the audience in a minute, but you have 250,000 TV episodes and movies, 250 live channels, and some now exclusive content, which you're leaning into. A lot of criticism, and this was a criticism when HBO started, is that it's a lot of old stuff, right? Which is cheap, you can get that, and there's tons and tons and tons criticism when HBO started, is that it's a lot of old stuff, right? Which is cheap, you can get that. And there's tons and tons and tons of old TV shows,

nostalgic reruns, obscure titles. You've been referred to by some as a bargain basement. Now, there's nothing wrong with a bargain or a basement, I have one myself. What do you think about that when people say that? We have heard that a lot. And it's one of those where, other thing people say about Tooby is that it feels weird and wonderful and that they feel seen by some of the content, specifically a lot of groups

that aren't, again, represented in Hollywood. And so I think our view is we lean in to the content that we put out because it's the content our viewers want. And we don't want to be the arbiters of quality. We let our audience tell us what's good. And if our audience wants to stream that movie from the 90s, great. We want to be the place for that. And if there's content and stories that people want that, again, they can't get enough of then we're gonna go out and produce it And so, you know, I think actually say like, you know when people say To be to be's got this like weird vibe and you know, it feels different

I think that's awesome because in a market like this you need to be different. Otherwise, what are you? What are you offering? You're like you've gone around and like, well, maybe like an antique shop, like pulled in all these things. Our founder Farhad, bless him, spent, you know, Toopy's been at this for over 10 years. So for 10 years, he was running around Hollywood saying, free ad support, everyone was like, you're crazy. And then saying, hey, will you license? He would go to the studios and he would knock on their doors and say, can you license your content?

And at the time that was very taboo, no one wanted to do it. And then now fast forward to where we are today, everyone's licensing to everyone. They're looking in their basements and they're like, oh, this might be good, this might be good. I'll offer sort of something else I think is interesting.

From what we can see, you know, we think of old content, we call it nostalgia, right? But you have to remember for the next generation, it's new nostalgia, right? New nostalgia, ooh. Yeah, they don't know. You're a marketing person, I see. You know, like they don't know.

New nostalgia. To be fair, that wasn't me, that was our Samo. But you know, it's not old. And great movies stand the test of time. One of the things that reminds me of sometimes Tooby is if you vomit it up a blockbuster, It's not old. And great movies stand the test of time. One of the things that reminds me of sometimes Tooby is if you vomited up a blockbuster. You know what I mean?

Or like carefully built a blockbuster over 10 years with love and care and attention and passion. Yes, right. You know what I mean? I'm like, oh my god, I haven't seen this since I was in the blockbuster for kids. Blockbuster was a story you went to. And you rented movies, and you took them back until Netflix came and then they sent you

stuff and you took them back. I just found a Netflix disc the other day and I wrote Reed Hastings. I'm like, I'm not sending it back. I don't care what you do. That's awesome. But I think there's something to it. You know, if you remember, I remember my Blockbuster experience and the thing that was unique about ... Four?

I mean, I was a little older than that. Old enough to remember. And, you know, what I remember about that experience was it felt fun to discover. And I think the delight of discovery, the fun of like, I don't know what I'm going to find, that is what we have lost in streaming. And what's really cool about what we see on the behavior on 2B is like someone might come in because they were looking for a movie from an old movie and then they find it and then they're like, oh, 2B is a thing. And then they start to go down rabbit holes

of discovering stuff they hadn't seen or even discovering new interests. And I think that is trying to mirror in some ways that feeling. That feeling. And also you don't have the candy though that they had at Blockbuster, which was delicious. So speaking of that, all the streamers have genres like thriller, drama, comedy, kids, et cetera, but the niche on Tubi is really interesting. Here's some, canceled too soon,

goats, nerve, and excellence for the culture, magical Christmas love, which is essentially the hallmark channel, something completely different, and of course course demonic possessions and exorcisms. Very popular. Very popular. Talk about these categories because they're odd and interesting. Do you have a favorite as a go watch, the name of a collection?

Oh, that's a great question. I mean, this is not a favorite because it's not fun or cool, but I just love the fact that 2B shows you stuff by Rotten Tomatoes rating. It's not so simple, but I find that like, it's a major factor for me. But to the genres, I think what we believe is that audiences are much more intersectional in their tastes. That this old concept of genres and demos made sense in a world of traditional television

when you're programming, it's a monoculture, right? It's one show everybody watches. We're the opposite. It's we help stories find their audience. And so those are getting always optimized and updated and changed. And our curation team will throw cool stuff in there. And it's kind of this mismatch of us listening to what's happening on social, what's happening

from our own content, and then what we just see from the collection. And so it's an ever-evolving thing. And there's no rules around, like, it has to fit into this thing or that thing, because we're letting the audience kind of show us what they're congregating around. OK, I have one for you. Stick with me on this one. because we're letting the audience kind of show us what they're congregating around.

Okay, I have one for you. Stick with me on this one. Roncom movies where the villain reminds you of Matt Gaetz. Some kind of wonderful. Some kind of wonderful would be in there. I think we need to bring you on as an intern. I feel like it. Okay, I'm just saying, just saying.

Because I would totally click on that. There's so many. You start to think of it, you're like, oh yeah, all those 80s movies. So the content category, you speak to the audience, you're targeting, as you said, 81 million people. Demographically, according to Nielsen, it skews a little older, but you're targeting not

cord cutters, but cord nevers, although you can get it on cable, by the way. Talk about how you're reaching them and what's the pitch to your average. If it's so diverse, how do you figure out what the right average is? I think once you get to a certain scale, like you're at the 80 million mark, generally your audience is going to represent, and on average, they're going to look like the general population at a certain scale. What we look at is where we over index and on average, they're going to look like the general population, just at a certain scale. What we look at is where we over-index

and where we're seeing the fastest growth. And there, what we see is it's younger, multicultural, female-forward audiences. And I'll give you some stats that we see. So about 65% of Tubi's audience are cord cutters or cord nevers, meaning they never even, you know, kind of thought about having a cable subscription in the first place. And I think more interestingly, what we're seeing is that a good percentage of our audience

are not subscribing to other services. They are in fact not on Netflix, even though probably everyone we know is on Netflix. And they're very distributed around the country. In advertising speak, it's incremental audiences. So if you're a brand and you're trying to reach America with your story, if you only advertise on cable and Netflix, you are missing a real swath of the country who just aren't going to do either of those things. Are those like undecided voters, those people? a real swath of the country who just aren't going to do either of those things.

Are those like undecided voters, those people? There may be some overlap there. But it's a real and growing part of America because in particular young people are like, oh, I'll just watch stuff on my phone or on my laptop and I only want stuff for free. And so that is where we are seeing the most strength. All of the content that we've been putting out on our originals, it's very much targeted to that kind of group.

And it's really working and resonating. And advertisers are responding because for them, they're not duplicating their spend now, reaching the same audience. And it's actually quite hard to reach that audience in a brand safe kind of television-like format because the only other place they can find those people are on social media, which is a very different place

to advertise. Or on old television, which is declining in numbers. And a lot of young people aren't watching broadcast television. Right, I've noticed. So they watch it in different ways. They're watching. It's just how they're watching, right?

I love when they say it's over. I'm like, it's not. It's just moved. I think it's more background viewing. Yeah. How much is on the phones versus... I now watch everything exclusively on phones. It's crazy.

I will actually tell you, in Tubi's case, it surprised me. We are more TV, smart TVs, than I would have expected. I think that's actually more just because we haven't invested enough in making our mobile app experience as good as it can be. And actually, this past month, we introduced a new mobile experience that has the scroll-like TikTok feature to discover content.

Young people definitely are consuming on mobile. And at a minimum, they're discovering on mobile. They may learn about something and start to watch an episode. And then... Right. So let's go back to categories. This is really interesting. In June, almost half of Tubi users were black. This was really interesting.

You have black cinema, black drama, black independent cinema, black thriller, and Denzel Washington has his own category, which is interesting. You overindex on other multicultural groups, as you said, as well as younger LGBTQ viewers. Are you specifically buying content with these groups of mind, and what else are you doing to attract new audiences? Our whole premise is breaking the monoculture. It's saying what people might see as niche is actually core

if we can replicate that and serve many, many different fandoms. And so what's interesting, in 2B's case, 2B never set out to go after any specific group. It was, let's have all the content we can, let's make it free, and let's do a good job of helping people discover. And what's happened is, we're seeing certain communities

and fandoms start to develop organically on the platform, and then our team is listening and saying, okay, let's bring more of that content. And so we've seen it certainly with black audiences. I think there, what we hear very much is that they just don't get enough content that's black talent, black storytellers that represents their lived experience.

And just to give you an example, to be, we go to Detroit, we go to Houston, we find independent distributors, aspiring filmmakers who are producing content on homegrown budgets that would never get platformed in sort of the traditional system, and we're putting that content on Tubi, and it's getting millions of views organically.

By surfacing it. By surfacing it, and by, once somebody finds something, we're good at showing you things that you might not fully realize that other people like. And so that strategy, we're seeing the same thing with LGBTQIA audiences. We're seeing the same thing with Hispanic audiences. We're seeing the same thing with horror, true crime,

thriller. So I think that, to me, this is, again, if you think about YouTube, which is really the number one sort of streamer, if you think about it. No, it is. It is. It's bigger than Netflix. That's my older son's watch exclusively.

So it's interesting. You had a tech background. You were CEO of Vimeo before you came to Tubi. Vimeo was a online video platform that's now focused on businesses. Yes, that's not YouTube. But Tubi is one of the first streamers to work with open AI to help users discover what to watch. I want you to talk about that collaboration.

Are you still working with them and talk about how AI is central to the growth of these things? So I will say first, we don't see AI, 2B does not see generative AI today yet as being sort of a major driver of our business. What we are interested in, what we've been testing, and not just with OpenAI, with really a lot of different LLMs, is can we use AI just to improve the content discovery process?

So what we have tested is like, today you search by the name of a title or by genre or content, what if you searched by mood, right? And you're just like, I'm in the mood for X and can we find ways to get you more of that content? So that's really the realm in which we're currently looking at AI.

And I think for me that the goal isn't to use AI, the goal is just continue to improve the user experience and improve discovery. And AI is one tool with which we can do that. But not creating programming. We are not. You know, I think it's safe to assume at some point in the future that will become possible from everything I have seen. And I did spend almost a decade at Vimeo in the video space. And actually, all we did for 10 years

was try and build tools and technology that would lower the barriers for people to produce professional quality content. And I can tell you, it is very hard. It is an extremely complex workflow from the minute you have an idea to actually creating content, to getting it into a final form. And so my overall view is I'm optimistic

that if used responsibly and well, Gen.ai can accelerate creativity. But- What about using Empowering AI to create content itself? I think you're gonna see that. My bet is the closest use case today or in the near future is gonna be more actually for brands and advertisers.

I think I can see- Well, Coca-Cola ad they just did. Yeah. I can see Gen.A.I. getting to a place where it can really help you take that ad that would have cost a lot of money, that spot, and produce it and then dynamically optimize it. I think for long form storytelling, I am in the camp that believes that Gen. AI will just lower costs and increase speed for a very complex process. I don't think that filmmakers and storytellers are going to get replaced.

I do think you're going to see a democratization though of, you will see more different types of storytellers. Sure. Sure, sure. I'm absolutely convinced that Netflix fed all the Hallmark movies into AI and created Hot Frosty. I mean, no one's going to tell me. The world will never know. No. Hot Frosty.

I recommend it. Something vaguely weird about it. We'll be back in a minute. Support for On with Kara Swisher comes from Elf Beauty. What does it look like when a majority of a company's board of directors is made up of women? Well, it actually looks like Elf Beauty. Elf Beauty is making the best of beauty accessible to every eye, lip and face, and they're changing the board game while they do it.

Out of about 4,100 U.S. publicly traded companies, they're the only one to have a corporate board of directors that is 78% women and 44% diverse. With the latest campaign, their goal is to double the growth of women and the diverse candidates on corporate boards by 6% by 2027. I cannot tell you in the many years I've covered corporate issues, how unusual these statistics are,

and to point it out is critical. A company's board should reflect a company's customers. You cannot create great products without understanding those customers, and you cannot create those products unless there is diversity of all kinds, not just gender diversity, in the executive and C-suite roles. It's time to change the board game. It's easy to start there.

Visit elfbeauty.com backslash change the board game to learn more. Original Contact was a critical weapon in the streaming wars and IP especially. Netflix shelled out big bucks and initially Netflix was other things not original and then they started doing a bunch of different things. But they're pulling back on that. They are because they've spent an enormous, to gain the ground they spent, read and Ted spent an enormous amount of money and Bella and the rest. According to a recent Nielsen report, their original program only accounted for 25% of the audience's time on

streaming platforms in 2023. So they're spending an enormous amount of money, but what people are there for is not that. But you have more than 300 originals. Now you're not making them on the Game of Thrones budget. Like, what is it, like $16 and a little camera. Talk about the business strategy. We're doing efficient originals. Okay. What I would, I will say, I actually think it's a very, Tubi's approach to originals is very different and it all comes down to the business model.

So I think if you are a subscription service, originals are basically your way to acquire customers. So you're going to spend a lot of money, you're going to spend a lot of marketing dollars for every single one of those titles. And then you're likely now you have to retain them and avoid that churn. And so that's where I think the sort of icon that the library comes in. I think in Tubi's case, we're a little bit different. Again, we're free, we make it easy to find whatever you want. We have this huge collection. And what we do is use originals

to just drive engagement because that's all we care about. We only make money when you are watching actively because we only make money on advertising and you can't monetize an ad unless someone is watching. So fundamentally changes how we think about everything. And so our originals, yes, we've created 300 originals. I can tell you that the total cost of that is, you know, far less than, you know, less than a premium subscription service.

What's interesting is about one in four 2B viewers watches a 2B original, so similar to the stat that you shared. How much does an average 2B movie cost? It ranges, but you can assume that we're a fraction of a lot of it. You released a first original movie to the theaters too. You're using many distribution methods. In September, it's called The Thicket. It's a very gloomy Western starring cutthroat,

non-binary character played by Juliette Lewis. She's fantastic. And also Peter Dinklage. It's got stars. Talk about why you decided that. In our case, where we'll take bigger swings on projects is where we have good signals and validation that there's a fandom on Tubi that wants that content. It's easier for us to go and say, okay, and because we understand what our audience is

looking for and we're not trying to, it's not an acquisition to get you to pull out your credit card. It's just, do we think people will watch this based on all the other data points we see? Non-binary Western. I don't know where that came from. But believe it or not, there is- I don't. Go ahead.

I will tell you. I've got, here's a recommendation for you. It's Winona Earp was a Canadian Western thriller, like fantasy show on like sci-fi years ago got cancelled. And the fans, they're called the Earpers, went nuts on social media. My team picked it up because we spent a lot of time on social listening. And we commissioned a special, resurrected it. And I mean, I wish I could have had you at Comic-Con to see the Earpers. This is a perfect example of fandoms.

This is the perfect example of breaking the monoculture. And so, yeah, a lot of the stuff you're going to see us do is going to be like, no one else would do that. Exactly. I have another idea for you. OK, West Wing comes. Bring back the cast of West Wing, but do like White House Down,

or London is Falling, or White, but they attack the White House. Maybe if we throw in some zombies? Something, something like that will work. I'm just saying, there's a lot of West Wing people, you'd like to see them do some action. Alright, so, The Thicket is not on Tubi yet. It's available for rent on Apple TV though, which is interesting. You had it in the theaters. It's on Apple TV Prime Video, YouTube and elsewhere.

You're being paid for this, right? Is this exclusive versus shared content? Talk about why is it not on Tubi? Yeah, so, and I should say that this is our first foray into anything on the theatrical or TVOD side. So today, this is the first time we're doing this. This isn't something that Tubi's done a ton of. But what I will say is in this case,

the sort of rationale here was more about marketing, right? Because we don't spend huge marketing budgets for our content. And so getting that opportunity to have it out in the box office, you know, people rate it, they review it, you get some value from that. And in this case, by sort of putting it out with some of the other platforms, office, people rate it, they review it, you get some value from that. And in this case, by putting it out with some of the other platforms, we do de-risk our

economics so that we can bring that content to our viewers in a way that financially makes sense. It's almost the reverse of, usually you have an original and then you have the tail of that and you're licensing it. I think most, I'd say the vast majority of 2B's original, 2B originals, we just put on the platform, we promote it organically. We do have a few that we will put marketing dollars around. We just this weekend launched an original.

It's, you're gonna love this. It's based on a Wattpad young adult novel and stars Noah Beck, who's a TikTok star in his first movie. It's not quite hot frosty. I think it's better. OK. And it's got football. But what's it called? Sideline, the QB and me. Prepare to catch feelings is the log line.

But I'll tell you, it's really interesting. So that is an example where like we- I hate Gen Z so much. But they love you, Kara. I know they do. It's bad. I get stopped a lot. That was one where we were making a bet again on that young generation and not having to

spend millions and millions of dollars on marketing because it's going to be on TikTok and Reddit. And I can tell you, it's absolutely worked in the first three days. It is by far our best performing in terms of viewers content on to be ever. And so you're going to see us just continue to experiment with these different models. You said, you said TikTok, but Reddit is enormously popular. I keep telling people that over and over again.

This is where my sons discover everything. I will tell you, I fully agree, and the 2B Marketing team and our CMO, they are on Reddit all the time. And you can't force it onto Reddit either. It has to be from the bottom. Yeah, I mean, sorry, they're not like trying to shape the conversation. But they're listening. They're listening, and we do use, we use a lot of different signals like that because our job is to be in touch with what audiences want.

And that's absolutely what we have to do. Yeah, yeah. So at the end of November, you announced that you've greenlit five new films as part of a collaboration with The Blacklist. Explain what The Blacklist is and then what are you doing with them? So The Blacklist is Franklin Leonard's,

it's sort of the underestimated projects that aren't getting green light in Hollywood. That should be. And I think this all goes back to, again, our perspective, which is we want to help bring more stories from these underestimated audiences, and we recognize that you have to go and source that from other places.

So we have a partnership with The Blacklist. We just announced five projects. That's one thing. We're doing a lot of other things. In April, we announced the first fan-fueled studio. It's called Stubios. It's called Stubios. Did you have to do that?

I mean, to be studio. Stubios, get it? Ha ha. Explain why is that? Issa Rae is mentoring Stubios. I love Issa Rae. She's. I love Issa. Issa is, she's a mentor and that's another example and where anyone can pitch their project via studios, via an app, we will green light fund,

help produce and distribute content that gets certain fan engagement. And I can tell you very explicitly, what we are trying to do is bring more unique stories from unique storytellers into streaming. We're trying to find a scalable way to do that. It's not going to make a difference if it's just a few. It's got to be come a part of our flywheel.

So you're going to be... Lisa's been a mentor to a lot of people. So she's an example of like a digitally native creator who kind of moved into Hollywood and she's uniquely a, I think, position to be able to give advice to some of the folks that are kind of coming up via Stubios. A lot of them have social followings and are social creators. It's a totally different world. And so we're trying to, and by the way, no one has figured out how to do this, even YouTube.

Do you remember when Ben Affleck and Matt Damon had that show where they were trying to create shows? Oh, that's right. Yeah. Remember it was like a shark tank. This is a hard problem. It's a very, very's right. Remember, it was like a shark tank. This is a hard problem. It's a very, very hard problem. And I will tell you, like, Stubios for us is blacklist.

These are all attempts at creating, at sort of innovating the content pipeline. I don't know how long it will take us to figure out what will scale, but we're going to figure it out. But is this like an attempt to compete with YouTube or TikTok? Is that what you... Because TikTok is not doing long form stories yet. I would say, first of all, we absolutely compete with both TikTok and YouTube

because we're competing for people's time and attention and entertainment, and that's where they're spending their time. That being said, we're not trying to recreate social. And even if you look at what YouTube has done with the creator economy, which I am a huge fan of and very impressed by. And again, I spent nine years trying to compete with YouTube at Vimeo. For us, it's less about that. look at what YouTube has done with the creator economy, which I am a huge fan of and very impressed by.

And again, I spent nine years trying to compete with YouTube at Vimeo. For us, it's less about that, and it's really just about listening to our audience. And if they tell us they need more of X or Y or they're looking for X or Y, and we can't get it through the current sort of options in front of us, we're just going to design something else. And so I would say, Stubios is a little bit about the creator economy, but we're not coming at it as like- So you're putting a stake in the ground there.

Yep, yeah. I mean, what we're just saying is we want to find, we wanna open up the aperture for what kinds of storytellers can create great movies and TV shows, and then get distribution. It really is a different way of thinking about entertainment, which is interesting.

I'm gonna get to your career in a minute, but I wanna talk a little bit about the business model here. Now you're using this all as a fast service, free and ad supportive, which is the way TV used to be. That was TV. A lot of subscription services are now doing ad supported tiers. Netflix has been very successful, actually.

On the other hand, Amazon just pulled the plug on Freevy, which is not a great name, honestly. Why do you think that failed and how do you feel about these new competitors in the ad-supported space? I will delineate Ad Tears from free. If I look at what Netflix and Disney and others are doing, totally makes sense for them, adding a tier. You actually have to pay. So you have to pay to watch ads. Now compare that to free with ads.

That's actually quite a different value proposition. And in a lot of cases, including I think with freebie, freebie was a funnel. It was a sort of top of funnel for eventually getting you into paying as a subscriber. And I think there's immense power and simplicity of focus when your business model is totally aligned with your customer, right? And like being free and ad supported only.

There's no tiers, there's no upsells. We're not trying to increase your lifetime value by also selling you soap and software. These are amazing businesses. Again, I used to work at Amazon. It leads to fundamentally different decisions. If Tubi does its job, we should be able to offer a better value proposition because we are really only successful when the viewer is engaged. So Free V failed why?

I don't know why Free V failed, but I would say if the mission was to build the number one free streamer, I don't think it was ever set up for success, because I don't think that was ever really the goal. And that's our goal. So it's more, I think, about what do you believe is the future of streaming? What should it be? And are you designing something for it? Versus, are you another way to acquire customers or monetize?

And I just think those are fundamentally different things, and they show up in really meaningful ways. So people don't realize, Tubi is a Fox corporation, and CEO Lachlan Murdoch is certainly excited about it. He talks about it a lot on earnings calls, largely because they've had so many failed digital efforts, like all of them. I've been there.

I've seen all of them. Yeah, actually. Yeah, you spent a lot. Everyone. So you said many of it is a conscious choice not to be profitable. Can you explain that and how long which runway do you have with Jolly Lachlan Murdoch is the way I like to think of him. So To be is not profitable today. We have shared that we expect to cross a billion dollars in annual revenue in the next few quarters So I don't think people may be fully appreciate that. It's not just that we're getting people to watch we are building a sustainable

Revenue driving business the key to sustainability is ultimately profitability. Especially within a corporation. Especially within a corporation. And so I would say it is very much important and part of my job to make sure that we are getting to profitability. But the difference, and I think it matters and I've seen it, is there's one way

to get to profitability is, oh shoot, we have an earnings, you know, there's stock pressure, cut a bunch of costs to get to profitability is, oh shoot, we have an earnings, you know, there's stock pressure, cut a bunch of costs and get to profitability. The other way is grow sustainably, steadily, and every single week, month, quarter, get more efficient so that your revenue is growing faster than your costs and that is how you get to profitability.

And so that's what we're doing. I think we have total alignment from the top to the team about how to do that. And this is why every time I think when we talk about originals and we talk about these new initiatives, it's all about can it scale? That is the way you build an enduring sustainable business. And I think it's not, this isn't gonna be

like a crazy long time horizon. We feel pretty clear on what we need to do. I want to talk about your career and this sort of topic we're doing here with Elv. You were CEO at Vimeo. Your path as a CEO was unusual. It's just, I know it's a few years back. You were head of marketing. You developed a strategy and got tapped even though you hadn't thrown your hat in the ring.

Typically the CFO or CTO would have been tapped in a company like Vimeo, the profit and loss role essentially, which is often a man. It's been a glass ceiling for women in the C-suite, absolutely. Talk about how you ended up with a job and when you jump from marketing to the CEO. Just for you know, in 2023, only about 10% of Fortune 500 companies were led by female CEOs. Yeah, I mean, my path was a surprise to me in many ways,

and it's a very rare one. I wish it was not as rare. But I joined Vimeo as a director of marketing, team of five, very kind of middle management. And during the three year period, the business just went through a lot of strategic change and we were looking for a new CEO for a year. And just definitely didn't occur to me.

At that time I think by then I was the VP of marketing. So I was like, there's just, that wasn't a thing on my radar. I think what ended up happening is that I sort of just almost by accident became the internal champion for a very different strategy, which was to pivot and stop competing with YouTube and move to business and B2B video.

And I was kind of like, I think I might be out of a job if we go this other direction. So can I just, what if you gave me a small team, and I actually was like a general manager for a year. So between marketing and becoming CEO, I spent a year with a small team, and it was like a startup, like an incubator, and we had product engineering, marketing,

we had the whole, and we just kind of tried to build this like business offering. Right, which was smart because you can't compete. You know, this reminds me of when Twitter one time came to me, which we did to compete with Facebook. I go, stop competing with Facebook, maybe. We had lost the battle. We had lost the battle.

And I think that part was clear. It was more just like, OK, but then what? And so what happened is you have this team and we're kind of succeeding. And here you have this, at the time I guess I was 32 year old who probably has some naivete and kind of does, but is willing to bet, willing to bet her career all in like let's go, this is the future. And I will say, I think relevant for the conversation that Alf has sparked is, I think the insight here

is that culture matters for change, and it starts at the top. And Vimeo was owned by Barry Diller, another ex Fox person, but runs his own internet conglomerate. And Barry has a very explicit philosophy that I'm gonna throw people into the deep end of the pool, see if they sink or swim, and I will give people opportunities, regardless

of age or experience. Which he had, by the way. Which he had. And here's the thing about culture, when it's at the top, it cascades. And so what happened is that Barry had a protege who he put in charge of IEC, a gentleman named Joey Levin, who also was given that role in his 30s.

And Joey is the one who took a chance on me. And he's the one who said, you know, she has potential, I'm gonna give her that opportunity the same way I had it. And then when I found myself in the CEO seat at 33 with no real experience, I also was looking around and saying, oh, I'm going to bring, actually I think she might be in the room here, one of my colleagues who became the COO at Vimeo

and is now with me at Tubi. And in fact, we even had someone from the Vimeo team, I'm very proud, who's gone on to be a two-time CEO in her own right. And so this is what happens if that philosophy is set and followed, and it takes time, too much time. But I do think that I've seen that. I've seen how that

cascades. So in terms of product and how you manage, is it different? Because I hate to ask women these questions to say, but you know, you're a unicorn and so let's talk about being a unicorn because you are. Like there's no other way around it. And so let's talk about being a unicorn because you are like there's no other way around it I speaking of a CEO very one of the few women's use is Susan Wojcicki who recently died who I knew very well She was the only one there right in many ways They have a lot of executives Sheryl Sandberg and others there but very few and she managed differently. She definitely did so talk about your management style your executive team is split 50-50. There's a lot of diversity.

Was a conscious decision, especially in this day and age when there's so many, including at Fox, anchors openly anti-DEI, they have only one woman in the executive team, by the way, there. Did you make a conscious decision to do it this way? So I did not. In that, I did not look at it as I would like to build an executive team that is 50% women and 50% diverse, which is what we have at Tubi. I looked at it as it is my job to build the absolute best

team to win in this industry. And it's just more that I have a recognition, and it probably is because of my background, who I am. I've seen it. I believe it, that talent comes in different forms than only what is represented at the top today. And if you want to win in business, you better build a team that unleashes maximum talent.

That's what you got to do. And so I always say is like, and I think this about, when we think about empowering women, we need to reframe it into empowering talent and reframe less about equity and more about impact because it is true. And we've seen the numbers from Alpha about that. And so that is genuinely how I have thought about this for my whole career.

And I can tell you, as someone who represents represents minorities often in the top, I appreciate that. I don't want to be a token. I don't want to be the person that people think is in the boardroom because of the way I look. It's my experience and what I'm offering, am I adding value? That's how I've thought about it. We have to prove the results of that at Tooby. Do you get any pushback from the company itself?

It isn't the most fast forward company in that regard. As are many, let me be fair. Not an ounce of pushback and this is why I think you have to reframe it because we are a capitalist society. America. It doesn't matter what company. We are businesses. You're on a board.

You care about creating a shareholder value, that is your job. So if you make it about business outcomes and you make it about impact, everyone can get on board. And so, you know, I really, to me, it has always been about that. You can't not get behind that. Right. Yeah, they can. So many can.

That's why she's sour and I'm spicy. No, I'm just saying they can. They do. They do. They do. Trust me. So it's suicidal in many ways for these corporations to behave like this, I think. It's self-defeating in a lot of ways, but they do. But that said, Fox, is this correct, gave to be the official red carpet show for this

year's Super Bowl? Is that used to leverage ads, for example? That's a big deal to be part of that. Do you have rights to air a repeat of the Super Bowl after it finishes, which I think was very popular last time Fox did for the Super Bowl, and you have those rights for the World Cup, which did well. That's a great affiliation for you, correct? It is. So, you know, one of the things, part of my job is also, you know, Tooby has been run so entrepreneurially,

but we are getting to a size where we do need to find how can we leverage some of the strength of Fox to create these advantages. And Fox Sports, obviously sports is so powerful today. We're seeing how it's being used by others in streaming. And in Tooby's case, on a standalone basis, we can never compete with, we can't buy premium sports,

right? That's way too expensive for our model. And so what we have been looking to do is how do we kind of create programming that is around sports culture, the culture around sports. And what you're going to see for the Super Bowl is some version of the 2B purple carpet. My CMO has let me know that that name is still being worked on. But it is more around the fashion and the culture of the game. Right now, it's less about streaming the actual game.

It's more about creating some of that conversation. And just another example, we launched a talk show this month with Deion Sanders, Coach Prime. That's just a talk show on 2B, where he's talking about all the things he and Roxy Diaz and I'd say you're going to see us experiment more and more with that and same with the World Cup. We'll look around like what are the athletes and the stories?

And by the way, a lot of this isn't just based on the economics. It's what Gen Z audiences are telling us they're interested in. In fact, what we see in the data, in some cases they are spending less time and are less interested in the actual live sporting events., they are spending less time and are less interested in the actual live sporting events. Yeah, who wants to watch the game? They're more interested in the stories and the culture around it.

And so that's, I think, the most natural place for 2B to play. And obviously, if someone wants to let us stream some premium sports rights, we're not going to say no. Yeah, right. So one of the things that Fox doesn't have a general interest SVOD, explain what that is in a second. Do you think you might morph into that for Fox? So SVOD is subscription video on demand.

So that's the net. Right, or AVOD. Yeah, and AVOD is advertising. No, I don't. Certainly not in the foreseeable future. Nothing is sacred in business and I would never- Because they don't have one. Say, yeah, I wouldn't say, but I will say the sort of connected TV advertising market is like $40 billion. And that's almost entirely Fortune 500 brands. You haven't even opened

up the aperture if you can have smaller businesses and brands who can access this audience. So my view is, and I think we're all aligned, is like if Tubi has the momentum, it's because of the focus and the commitment and the purity of our model. Like don't mess with that. And so I don't think that is something that we will do. It doesn't mean that Fox won't look at some point to have a D2C offering in certain areas. But I think we have so much room to scale and grow in what we do. And what we need to do is keep doing it better and better. Right, so you don't need their things, right?

So would you want to be independent? I have learned, having taken Vimeo Public, people always think like, oh, you go public or you're independent, like that's so exciting. To me, this is about a mission and what is the best home for 2B to be able to fulfill its mission. And right now, I will tell you, I really appreciate and value being part of a large company

that has the resources to invest in us and not being so big that we move the stock price. It allows us to think long term and stay committed to our principles. I don't know how long that will last, but I think it's a benefit to us and a gift that we must utilize. All right. I have two more questions. Tubi is on 30 different devices, including Apple Vision Pro.

Where's the growth coming from? Is it phones, VR? Do you... Where do you think people are going to be watching this stuff? I mean, today it is largely television, but it's very distributed. And when we look at the growth rates, they're pretty similar across devices, and I think mobile is absolutely going to grow. And when we look at the growth rates, they're pretty similar across devices. And I think mobile is absolutely going to grow.

And actually it's interesting because part of the reason people don't invest as much in mobile is because the advertising CPMs aren't as high. So what you really need is you need the monetization to kind of be compelling enough for people to start to really optimize that. But I think that will happen. I also just think you're gonna see in general as consumers,

like we are gonna be very fluid in the surfaces that we consume content. It's gonna be cars, it's gonna be stuff we're wearing. What I'm excited about in 2B's case is like, we're not kind of a walled garden, we are everywhere. And we are building a brand that will hopefully consistently demonstrate value, no matter

what surface you're on. And I think that's the key. You got to be ubiquitous in, I think, an environment where there's- Promiscuous is the word you're looking for. And is there anything you wouldn't put on to be like, one of the things, you're not in social media, you're not creating death and destruction everywhere you go. Is there stuff you used? And you used the word brand safety, which I think is important to advertisers,

it's a real problem right now being adjacent to white supremacists, etc. It's not a good business model. Is there stuff you wouldn't put on? Like, I don't know. Absolutely. I mean, to your point, we are not a UGC platform. Everything we do is brand safe. Our incentives are very aligned and it's just frankly not an issue that has come up.

But if it did, of course we would have to have that kind of approach, and look, again, I spent six years running Vimeo. We were an open UGC platform, and I can tell you, every time someone got deplatformed from YouTube, they went right onto Vimeo. And we had to tackle all the same challenges on content moderation and guidelines,

and how do you stay consistent and fair, but also recognize that society is moving fast and real world harms are happening. So, you know, if we had to do it, we would, but it really isn't, I think that's, it's just not something we can do. It's not something you have to deal with, no, because you can pick and choose,

and you recognize you're a publisher. Last question, will there be, when you do AI generated movies, what would be the category? Stuff Anjali thinks is cool. Okay, all right. You know, don't do it because a lot of stuff AI generates is super porny looking, even though it's not porny.

But go look at my pictures on AI. I just put up... And to be clear, we don't currently have any plans. Yeah, don't. It's super porny. All right. Anyway, thank you so much, Anjali. Thank you, Kara.

Thank you, audience, thank you so much, Anjali. Thank you, Kara. Thank you, audience, for being here too. On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Katari Yocum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Special thanks to Corinne Ruff and Claire Hyman and also to ELF CMO Corey Marchesato and the entire ELF team. Steve Vohn engineered this episode and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, maybe we'll make a fan show on 2B for you. If not,

are you a Peter, Richard or just a dick? Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.