Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) Black Widow Math And Fleets Fade Away

Episode Date: July 17, 2021

Bloomberg's @Lucas_Shaw comes on to explain the math of that Black Widow stream release story from Monday. Then @alexeheath from the Verge explains the death of Fleets, the creator thirst at Facebook and then we all get into the questioning the real value/process of Twitter verification. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. So welcome to another episode of the TechMeme Ride Home Experience for today is July 14th, 2021. We've got a lot of news to talk about, a lot of really exciting and interesting things. I'm highly caffeinated, but today we actually have a special guest.

We've got Lucas here from Bloomberg. And, you know, Lucas, if you want to, like, give us a bit of a sense for your beat, for the things you cover, I was looking back on kind of like your story archive. And you've got a bunch of great stuff that Brian and I talk about a lot. but we'd love to hear it straight from you. Yeah, thanks for having me on. I cover the business of entertainment, or I like to think of it as the future of entertainment for Bloomberg. That includes movies and TV,

so I write a lot about Netflix, I write a lot about YouTube, I write about influencers, I write about audio, so Spotify, Apple Music, and the like. And I write a weekly newsletter for Bloomberg called Screen, that is all about all of these subjects. I think the sub headline on it or something is where Hollywood and Silicon Valley collide, which has been what I've written about for the last several years. Very nice.

Well, we wanted to bring you on because there's been a lot of awesome stuff happening in the whole entertainment space. I mean, just today things are happening. But, of course, the big story that we want to talk to you about, or at least get your perception on, is what Disney is telegraphing with the news about Black Widow, the launch, the hybrid launch, what's happening there? What does this mean? What is your take on that? Well, it's a really difficult subject to have a clear take on, only because I think making

grand conclusions about the movie business right now can be very challenging. We have theaters open in most places, but not all places. in some cases at limited capacity. You know, the most obvious takeaway is that Marvel is still incredibly popular, and you drop a new Marvel movie, and it shatters every record that we've seen in the pandemic. The other interesting thing is that Disney chose to disclose how the movie did on the premiere access,

which is where you pay extra through Disney Plus. You pay 30 bucks, and you can watch the movie. You know, some people hailed this as a big win for transpansansansans, I don't really buy that. Most of these media companies are pretty selective about what they reveal about online consumption, like a lot of the tech companies. And so they tend to only release data when it serves a purpose for them, either because it makes the numbers look really big, or it covers over the fact that as far as Marvel movies go, this actually didn't do that well, which is sort of hard to believe when you think about 157 million at the box office.

And so I've heard a lot of different theories as to why they released it. I'm most curious whether they will choose to release data like that again with all of their movies because they haven't in the past and I don't know that they will in the future. Yeah. Oh, go ahead, Ryan. Well, this is what I'm most interested in really is, you know, I said on the show on Monday that, you know, that there's a reason why they decided to make this public because they thought the numbers were good enough. And what's different about this because obviously, you know, we've been a year into this where they're streaming and some of the movies

go on streaming, day and date, and things like that. But this is the first time that we've seen a release where it's you pay $30 or you go to the theater, right? So aside from whether Disney thought these numbers were good enough, what's your sense of Hollywood? Like, was this impressive numbers to everybody else? With the caveats that, again, maybe this is a second-tier Marvel universe movie. The pandemic is still ongoing, so maybe box office is still only at $40.

percent or something. But from your perspective, from what you're hearing in Hollywood, were people sitting up to take notice that like, oh, maybe this will work? I think it's, you hear a lot of different opinions. There are definitely those who take this as a

sign that it will work and that Disney released this because they planned to do it again. Because one title that they did it previously with was Milan last year. But that was when theaters were pretty much closed. You weren't having a lot of people go. This was unusual, as you point out, in theaters being open in most big cities, but also a lot of people

chose to watch it at home. And I think there's a desire in Hollywood for some kind of hybrid approach to work. And if Disney can make it work, then maybe Universal and Warner Brothers and others will as well. The challenging part is this is a new economic model. And so if you think about the $60 million that were made from the premier access, how much of that is people who wanted to go to the theater and instead chose to stay at home because they could. How much of that is someone who might have rented it down the line? The traditional Hollywood movie has what's called a waterfall in the industry where you make a ton of money, hopefully in theaters at first, and how much you make in theaters tends to inform how much you make in video on demand, how much you make in,

transactions in the iTunes store, rentals on Amazon, for the few people who still buy DVDs, all those things, all sort of what falls under home entertainment. And what we've seen happen in the movie business during the pandemic in particular is this complete collapse of that business. And so when you look at the numbers for Disney, you know, is the $60 million, $60 million, on the one hand, seems pretty good because I'd assume it's way more than any other movie made in, you know, opening weekend rentals during the pandemic. But if that's taking money out of what it would have inevitably made down the line, and is that

putting a dent in the total amount that the movie makes, that? That remains a total unknown and why I think you'll also see a lot of attention. What's the drop-off weekend two at the box office? Does Disney reveal any other rental numbers? Or did they just put out that $60 million? Because the fact is, is that number, because we don't have any other comparisons, it's just going to sound great because it's a big, round number. Well, but also, I mean, do we have any insight at all?

It sounds like not. You're saying everything's opaque. In terms of the economics of this, it's $30, which seems hugely expensive. but then if you think about, well, but that replaces, that's only sold to one household. So, like, that $30 has to replace maybe I took my wife and my two kids, and we all bought tickets at a night out of the movies, right? And popcorn and so on. Yeah, but popcorn goes to the theaters, right? Right.

But, again, the economics would be that $30 in theory goes all to Disney. They don't have to share that with anybody, right? No, they do have. So this is one of the misconceptions out there. Disney does have to share it, at least as far as I've been told and as far as most of the reporting, companies like Apple and Roku and Amazon take a percentage because it's an in-app purchase, which is usually something that they share in. And so the split is better. You know, with theaters, look, Disney wheels a lot of influence. So normally in theaters,

you say 50-50. With Disney, it's kind of more like 65-35 where Disney keeps about 65%, especially with a Marvel movie. But the number that the big tech companies and those distributors are taking probably closer to 20 or 25%. So Disney is keeping more. And in that sense, the economics are better. But to your point about family of four goes to the movies, I would guess that the average $30 that they're getting from a family that rents that is lower than they might have gotten from the number of families that went together or the gross number of tickets. So there's a little bit of a tradeoff there. So some of the questions around this are about cannibalization of the market, right?

And whether or not you're just, you know, Disney has access to more possible consumers who are eventually going to pay the premium for or to see this at home versus going to the theaters, especially in this kind of weird, you know, hybrid moments where the Delta variant is like searching and so on. So we don't quite know what the normal behavior is going to be about theaters. It may be that the theater going experience just isn't that good and is never going to to recover post-pandemic, and or that more people are going to be accessing these types of movies at home. So do you have a sense for whether, you know, it's going to be a hybrid sort of, I don't know, marketplace for the foreseeable future? Are these big platforms and

companies still experimenting and they're not quite sure how it's going to shake out? Or what is the sense? I mean, because like you said, I think parsing the numbers and why Disney would put this out there is really important because, again, they're telegraphing something to the world that either is saying, yes, it's safe to go back to the movies. Look, you know, we made $60 million off of, you know, the theaters or the hybrid release. Or actually, behavior is now changed and people are staying home. And that's where we're going to make our money going forward. Yeah, I think there is a desire on the part of all the big media companies to revert to

an altered version of what we had pre-pandemic, where movies do still have an exclusive run in theaters. And Disney does later this year have big movies that will have a longer window exclusive in theaters before they are made available at home. I think the idea of this kind of premium rental and certainly the idea of releasing new movies at home sooner, that's here to stay. You know, Netflix was already releasing lots of big movies at home day and date. Amazon was releasing a number of big movies at home. We can quibble over whether the types of movies that they're releasing are comparable to what a Disney release is, but Netflix is starting to spend more than $100 million on movies. They've got a movie with Ryan Reynolds and The Rock and Galgado coming out

later this year that I think is their most expensive or one of their most expensive movies ever. It's the type of movie you'd see a big studio release in theaters. All the traditional movie studios and their sister streaming services are adopting different versions of sort of a hybrid model kind of like this where, you know, Comcast and Peacock and Viacom, CBS with Paramount Pictures and Paramount Plus, there's going to be a condensed window where the movies will be in theaters first exclusively and then go on to streaming kind of anywhere from 17 to 45 days after the fact. That's where Warner Brothers and HBO Max are going after this year. They sort of famously this year dropped their whole schedule day and date theaters and streaming, but they're going

back to having a window starting next year. And I think Disney will as well. Their plan was starting in the fall pretty much when they felt that cases would be low enough. Of course, there are variables with the Delta variant. And if that spikes, maybe they'll adjust the release plan for a couple of their movies. But I think we're going to settle into this equilibrium where we'll have a lot of movies that are released on streaming day one. And then we'll still have certain movies that are released in theaters for anywhere from two weeks to six weeks and then available at home. Real quick, I want to squeeze this in before you got to go. Let me pivot to Peacock, which you just mentioned,

because you specifically had a piece on this in your newsletter this past week. Peacock apparently has like 14 million monthly active users, but only about 3 million of those pay for that, which, you know, I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but that seems to be like the worst of anybody, you know, which is not apples to oranges because, you know, HBO was already bringing in subscribers and, you know. But Peacock, being on by NBC, being owned by Comcast, your piece is, Comcast is willing to spend billions of dollars on this.

But I get the sense that it's not necessarily billions of dollars on the content. They're also going to try to have to spend billions of dollars to get people to sign up for this. I guess my question, if there is one here, is Whither Peacock, because I keep using the analogy of musical chairs. and all of a sudden I feel like they're kind of the weakest of the people looking for chairs right now? They've definitely gotten off to the slowest start if you exclude Quibi from this conversation of the established media companies trying to make the jump from being primarily kind of TV cable TV network owners into being streaming players. Peacock has gotten gotten off to the slowest start. You know, Disney has raced out done gangbusters.

Warner Media with HBO Max, I think got off to kind of a rocky start, but they've settled into a groove the past several months. They seem to be doing pretty well. Biacom, CBS, with Paramount Plus, is definitely bigger than Peacock. It's also been in the market for longer. I'd say those two are two of the ones where you're sort of wondering, what is the long-term plan? How are you going to make it so that most people feel they have to pay? You know, you know why people are going to pay for Netflix. It's sort of utility at this point.

Disney is going to get anyone who cares about Marvel or Star. worse, that's a whole lot of people. They're going to get any parent. That's a whole lot of people. They won't get everyone, but they'll get most of them. HPO Max is still probably got the best original programming lineup, at least in terms of dramas and comedies. And so I'm not sure what the angle that Peacock and Paramount Plus plan on taking, I think both of them have invested a lot in sports and are hoping that that will be a big driver. You know, both of them have NFL games for those people who don't pay for cable. Peacock has the English Premier League, which is a big deal for soccer. They have world wrestling entertainment, big deal for those fans, but those are pretty niche

fan bases. Similarly, Paramount Plus has some soccer rights. They have some college football, things like that. But they're definitely searching for what their whole is and what the lane is. I think the musical chair, the musical chairs, analogy or metaphor does work in the sense that most people think they're kind of four or five chairs, at least for the big mass market services. And three or four of them are taken already. And so everyone's kind of scrambling for that. last one. You're placing more chairs on the floor than even I would. But who did a Discovery Plus? They're combining with Warner, right? Yeah. So Discovery Plus is, I omitted because they are really more of a niche service. It's like if you love unscripted, you go there. But discovery, yeah, sorry,

go ahead. But I'm asking that for a specific question. So they're merging with who and it's becoming what's it called now? So Discovery is buying. or merging with, because Discovery is so much smaller, Warner Media. They're basically taking Warner Media away from AT&T, and they're going to merge it into something. That's HBO. So, okay, this is the question that I wanted to ask people a couple times now. I feel like Discovery Plus came out of nowhere and got more subscribers

clearly than even Peacock, but surprised people the number of subscribers. So my question that I wanted to ask is, a lot of people keep going with this HBO analogy, which is, you know, HBO for years had success because it's like, oh, I got to sign up for HBO because I keep hearing about the Sopranos show or whatever. But at the same time, we've been hearing for years that what Netflix, you call Netflix a commodity, not a commodity, a utility at this point, right? Because you want to just be able to turn it on and just watch something, you know, couch potato, veg out sort of thing. So maybe Discovery Plus kind of has the right

idea because they own all the reality stuff, right? So all of the sudden, I'm thinking that maybe a combined HBO with Discovery Plus, like, that has all of the pieces, because HBO has a back catalog and things like that, and they would have the, I just want to turn something on and turn my brain off, right? What do you think of that as a theory? That's certainly the operating theory behind the deal. If you're HBO Max, if you were AT&T, let's kind of pretend that AT&T wasn't very eager to get out of that purchase for the time being and just look at it as it is. There's no reason that HBO Max couldn't figure out how to do that type of programming. You know, Netflix went from having pretty much no reality to having a lot of

really popular turn my brain off reality television in like three years, maybe five if you want to go back a little bit, but they have a ton of it all, you know, the dating show, the circle, too ought to handle, Netflix sort of figured that one out. There's no reason HBO Max couldn't. Some of their early efforts, I would say, have been uninspired, but they have a couple shows that I know people watch, but I do think that there is a logic in combining

it because it would seem to give them kind of the complete package in terms of programming because Warner Media already has some sports rights. They have the HBO programming. They have a lot of animation because a cartoon network. They have movies from Warner Brothers. I mean, the HBO Max programming

offering is pretty strong. if you go through it. Because of the day and date movies as well? Yeah, I mean, I think that the smartest thing about the day and date movies, there's been a lot of criticism as to how they handled it.

They didn't kind of massage the Hollywood egos and the way that they should have, which I think is a fair criticism. But it was a really effective marketing tool in saying, you know, here's a new service. You want to know why you have to try to sign up for this thing?

It's because we have new big movies in a way that no one else does. And once you get those people, in, they can look around and see that Warner Brothers has a really deep library of good movies and TV shows. You have the HBO shows which are still very high quality. You have some animation. And if you do the combination with Discovery, which unfortunately for them will take a while to get through all the kind of regulatory processes, you then fold in one of the strongest, if not the strongest library of reality programming out there.

Right. I mean, I for sure am going to stay subscribed for Dune. I'm going to stay subscribed for Dune. I'm going to they subscribed for the new season of succession. And then if we stick around and there's all the house hunters going on in the background, then I just feel like that they have both sides of the coin, like more pieces than I think a lot of the other players are. Anyway, yeah, go ahead. Do you find yourself? I'm wondering, based on that question, do you add and drop different services based on what they have at any given moment? Or do you just sign up for something and let it ride?

I'm going to give you a very non-this isn't going to be a useful answer, but I subscribe to everything for my job, which you might do as well. Literally, I subscribe to everything because it's just like I need to do this stuff to report on it. So it's all expense. That's very nice. That's very good for you. Once the free promos expire, I'm not sure that I'm going to keep them. And I think that this is an interesting, I guess, behavior that we'll have to watch and see how much people do drop or stay subscribed. I know that one experience I had was I was on someone else's family Netflix plan.

And when I was removed from that plan, I lost all my viewing, like, history. And I had a lot. And so one of the reasons to stay subscribed is to maintain your preferences. You know, with all the, you don't want to watch the same stuff over and over again. You want to know how far you are in different seasons. And so that may actually be one of the things that keeps you hooked unless there's some either export, import, or whatever. So I think a lot of people would probably be willing to or interested in subscribing for a certain period of time, dropping it to save some money, subscribing again. But if you lose access to your preferences, that may actually deter people from engaging that behavior.

This is also a tip. If you want to subscribe to all the newsletters that are out there, get yourself a job where you have to report on all the news that the newsletters cover because you can expense that too. Listen, Lucas, we promise to get you out of here. You've got a meeting to go to. Thank you so much. Feel free to stay on the line, but we're going to pivot. So I appreciate you jumping on to talk about this. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, this is great. So this is a weird day where an absolute ton of news that we would want to talk about all dropped after I recorded the show today. So let's get to that and let's bring Alex on stage as well. But, you know, Chris, maybe you should tee this up. Oh, my God. I thought today was going to be like a normal day and we were just going to like mostly talk about like the streaming wars. But no, it turns out there's a lot of stuff that happened.

And top of the news, I suppose, is that Twitter is retiring fleets. Fleets rolled out to everybody last November. Of course, fleets is Twitter's take on stories. And stories everywhere is a hashtag that I've been using for quite some time to document the rise of this new mobile-first, full-screen, immersive, interactive format. But the fact that Twitter has decided, nope, you know, it doesn't make sense for us to keep pursuing this is very interesting on a number of fronts. You know, when they brought fleets out in the beginning, their argument was that they were looking for a less intense, less, I don't know.

This is sort of funny to say, but that the act of tweeting itself is intimidating. And so by adding ephemorality like Snapchat did many years ago to content, maybe that would actually lower the pressure of putting stuff out there in the world. Because the problem that Twitter has is one of content creation and engagement. And so what they're trying to design for and solve for is getting more people who have Twitter accounts to actually create content on the platform. And Fleets was there, I guess, I don't know. I mean, they borrowed it from Snapchat and Instagram. And obviously there's an advertising component to it. But they took it from there and they're like, oh, this will make it easier.

But it just didn't find its own rhythm and find its own source. And as I previously noted and they admitted to, most fleets ended up just being sort of people promoting their own tweets. So it was really great real estate for people who were exploiting it, but a lot of people weren't using it for the purpose that it was supposedly intended to be used for. So anyways, we've got Alex here from Alex Heath from The Verge, who wrote and broke the news about this today. Would love to sort of, you know, get your perspective on this, you know, and hear a little bit more about what's happening there. We've got other stories going on too, but let's start there. Yeah, I mean, I thought you summarized it pretty well. Twitter has had this existential problem really since it started, where the majority of its users don't actually contribute to the network, which if you run a social network, you know that is a long-term problem that will lead to inevitable decay.

And so Twitter hasn't grown as fast as investors would have hoped, and Fleets was probably their strongest stab at trying to lower the pressure around tweeting, which is And you've seen it, you know, that format that Snap invented. It's in every app now. It's in, like, LinkedIn. I'm not, it would be surprised if it's in a sauna. It's ridiculous. But Twitter hoped that this was going to get normals, and I say normal's lovingly. Yes, lovelyly.

Because, you know, I would love to be a normal on social media. What is that like? Yeah. Get normals to post more. And as you said, that didn't happen. and they're pulling the plug after eight months. And on top of that, they just started putting ads in fleets like a month ago. And it was their first test of full screen, kind of more immersive, rich media advertising in the app,

which advertisers love. And again, is a format that has become super popular across social media. So investors were looking at this as like, oh, maybe this is going to be another big ad source for them. And I'm actually, I was told that actually it's just like a function of the teams not communicating. Like the business side didn't really know that this was going to get killed on the product side. And so like these big companies, teams don't often communicate as smoothly as you would think that they do. So that's the reason that they just put ads in it a month ago and are killing it now. But yeah, it's another kind of embarrassing thing.

for them where something, you know, but I will give them kudos for acknowledging it and trying to move on, right? So that's, at least they're doing that. Yeah, I actually, because Kvon's tweets about it, we're saying that it's, he almost was saying we're making space for great more stuff that's coming. And my first thought on it actually was, well, wait, is this bullish for Twitter spaces and other things? Because it's like spaces had to live in that same. I think Toby, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, from Shopify even tweeted. Yeah. He even tweeted that he's like, you know, the multiple feeds

didn't work for Twitter. Yeah. So I'm almost wondering if like this is, it's like, yeah, all right, we've got other things that are better that we're more bullish on. So we've just got to clear the space to make room for this other stuff. Yeah, Twitter is definitely all in on spaces. I've been told that it's like the top project

internally. It's like where all the politics and money is gravitating and head count is gravitating towards. So everybody's like jockeying for to be on the spaces team and it's getting all the resources. So yeah, they're very all in on it. They said the spaces will still be at the top of the app if you have someone you follow who's doing a space, and they're also going to make that a main tab, right?

The spaces tab is going to, I think, replace Discover. It's going to be in the middle of the app once they roll that out fully. And it makes much more sense because it is more of an interest graph feature. It's one to many, which is Twitter, you know, kind of intrinsically, whereas fleets was supposed to be a little bit more like one-to-one or at least like more sub-network kind of behavior and not like one-to-many-thousand. So I think spaces is a much more natural Twitter feature to begin with. I mean, also just in terms of like solving the problem of a lower pressure place to create content, I mean, obviously spacecasts excluded, but spaces are

meant to be ephemeral and they go away, you know, after the room closes. And it allows people who maybe don't want to type or where English is in their first language or whatever it is, you know, to be able to participate in a lower pressure context. So it's sort of ironic that they copied, you know, Snapchat or Instagram from a few years ago and instead needed to copy Clubhouse from, like, last year. And so, I mean, maybe the fact that Twitter sort of had product market fit from the beginning with, you know, very small text messagey posts meant that they had to look elsewhere to actually get that inspiration to, you know, move beyond the text format. And they're not a great media platform.

You know, Periscope was okay, but not great. Vine obviously was very popular, but also not a huge success, not well-timed for the market relative to TikTok. And now, you know, the audio space is just blowing up and Twitter seems like the obvious place where people have the network. And they want to go to talk about what's happening right now in the moment. Yeah. I mean, if I had a long-term bear thesis on Twitter as a stuff, it would be that they continue to try to have their cake and eat it too and be this interest graph,

one-to-mini network, and also try to replicate more one-to-one networks. And hopefully this shows that they're focusing more on the creator economy side of things, where they actually do have very strong traction. And I think they could really give Patreon and all these other platforms to run for their money. But if they keep trying to like – but I mean, they have to fix the problem, too, where most people aren't contributing to the network. And so whether it's another monetization feature or something, I mean, that's like their long-term existential problem

that they've been battling for, like I said, 15 years. So I saw, you said, Bear, a tweet, I'd give credit if I remembered who it was or I could find it right now. But, you know, someone was saying that maybe they're clearing the decks because it seems like with all of these new products like newsletters and ticketing and things like they're trying to move the quickest of just about anybody right now to being that sort of um uh asian style super app where it's for lots of different things um what do you feel about this strategy it feels like that they're announcing new things and trying new things every other week at this

point which as we've commented many times like you know six months ago if you told me that i'd be like yeah that's not twitter twitter doesn't do all the things they're doing all the things now um What do you feel about their strategy right now of moving towards this? Let's try all of these micro things and all of these creator-focused things. I think when one of the most cutthroat take over hedge funds in the industry comes for your throat, you're going to act differently. Yeah, when you have a gun to your head, it's going to change how you act. I mean, I'm being a little over the top there, but you could chart the velocity and the features that are coming out directly to

what happened with Elliot coming in and threatening to kick Jack out and redoing the board. And so, yeah, Twitter's like, it's been shaken, I think, and, like, the stock's doing well because of COVID and everything else. And, like, they do have good momentum. But they keep missing, you know, relatively consistently on targets. And so they've been a little more out there on targets. They went ahead. And so I guess it's, like, kind of, let's see if this pays off in the next couple years. Fleet's not working is like not a great indication.

If I were them, I would want to be like touting spaces usage numbers like very soon. Maybe they'll do that on earnings in a couple weeks, but I would want to be like telegraphing to the street that Spaces is working. Because if Spaces isn't working, you've got two of their big bets that are flopping, which is not good. Let me use this to sort of seg into the other big news that broke after I recorded today. Because, you know, Twitter is one of everybody that is, you know, trying to embrace this creator economy stuff.

And the other news that just broke was Facebook saying that it's going to pay a billion dollars to creators by the end of next year, like literally doing bonuses if you hit milestones and things like this. To what degree is this everybody embracing the creator economy? To what degree are people just messing the, pants because they're so terrified of what TikTok is doing. What do you think of the idea that everybody is throwing money at creators right now? Everybody needs to own this, including Twitter, with things like, you know, ticketed spaces and newsletters and stuff.

These funds, these creator funds are 99% of the time completely like PR. And like this Facebook thing, for example, like the $1 billion number, that's like the magic number. you pull out of your hat when you want to like announce something positive. Google's going to contribute to fight homelessness in the Bay Area. They're going to commit a billion dollars. It's like you see this time and time again. Like it's just this like real nice, clean, big number. But it's like over a year and a half period and there's no other details about how it's

going to be distributed. So the only creator fund or like creator payout system that I've seen actually work was how Snap approached Spotlight where they did this kind of, you know, would actually just reward whoever had the best videos of the day and just send them money. And it was like based on an algorithm, they didn't really explain. But like people got paid millions and millions of dollars to the point where like drug down snaps like EBIT up because they were paying out so much to this program. And like when the company just says we're going to have a billion dollar fund and like that's the headline, you really have no idea how that's going to work or how it's going to be distributed. So I don't put much into that.

I think Facebook feels like it's very behind. in the creator economy, which it is. And like, you could argue that Instagram had the biggest opportunity to just own this space. And they didn't because Facebook is an ad-based model. And so I think they're finally realizing they have to, like, wake up to future revenue models on the internet, which is like direct monetization. And Mark is wanting to do that. And so he's very out there about it.

And it's more just like positioning themselves as a thought leader on this because they haven't been. and the badges stuff and all that stuff they talked about today, that's all been out there. It's really like they wanted to put a billion number on it and make it look big. But I think these funds are PR mostly. So one of the questions that I have about this, because I'm actually in the Instagram Badges program, and I made my first 100 bucks like last week or whatever going live. And I'm doing it largely to experiment and to explore. You know, like as Brian and I have talked about on the show,

I'm just trying to see what the new norms and ideas in terms of, you know, the audience, you know, is thinking about this and to what degree people are comfortable, either, you know, with tipping or participating in this different way. And I think there's another piece of this, which is that with the ad tracking transparency stuff that Apple introduced, you know, causing ad rates to really go down and is, you know, really harming Facebook's value ad in terms of being able to target content to different people, what we're using now or seeing instead is that creators become surrogates for, I guess, ad-based cohorts. In other words, based on the things that I'm interested in, you know, if advertisers or

brands want to work with me to reach my audience, they can do that as opposed to trying to go through, I don't know, like privacy stealing, you know, Facebook tools or whatever. So I guess what I want to know or understand from your perspective is to what degree do people on the other end of this who are not the creators think about the. this model? And is it necessary to spend a billion dollars on each platform to retrain the user base to become comfortable with and familiar with tipping and direct monetization relative to ads? Because clearly the advertising model, like that day seems to be, I wouldn't say, like, sunsetting completely, but clearly, as you said, there are future web monetization

models that are coming. And the question is, how fast are we going to get there? And how much, I guess, do the current, you know, web and app using... need to be trained in those new models. I don't sure if it's a thing of people needing to be trained. I think you could look at only fans or I think people are willing to pay for things and it's easier than ever to pay for things online. But Apple pay and like all these, you know, easy ways to send payments. And so I think it's just like the fact that the internet has matured to where all these models are very easy to do. And you have like companies like Stripe and Shopify that are doing the plumbing.

And so this didn't exist like five years ago, really, definitely not to the degree he does now. So you want a company the size of Facebook gets into it, it's just because the industry is matured enough to where it makes sense for them to do it. So I'm not sure you need to train people. I think the billion dollar fund is actually just to like tell creators, hey, like we're serious. Please don't go post or do Twitter super follows. Like, you know, we have this, we have this billion dollar pot of money over here. And like you may get some of it. like, you know, if you can find our partnerships person, the right one, like, good luck.

Like, it's more just to signal, like, hey, we are in this. And, you know, I know for a fact that, like, Facebook executives, the creator economy, like, buzz language did not exist inside Facebook until, like, all the media started writing about it in the last, like, year. Like, it's really, it's really a reaction to, like, the media and how everyone's talking about this in the industry. So I think it's more just, it's actually to get the, supply side engaged, not the demand side. I think the demand side already wants to like pay people for stuff. Like, have you guys ever noticed like there's already people taking their Instagram page, making it private and then sending you to their website to pay them to then get access to it? So basically

like only fans, like I've already come across this like three times randomly. That's going to be powerful. Like people already want this stuff as my point. So I just, I think they're more just realizing they got to like do what people want or they're going to go elsewhere, which is like the you know, also, you know, this is another topic, but like Facebook is a monopoly, like, okay, they're not behaving like one in this case, but that's another topic. So the thing that, and I just started reading or listening to The Ugly Truth, which is the new Facebook book, and it's just like, it feels to me that this is a new competitive, and by this, I mean like, I don't know, gladiator blood sport in the, I don't know, the social technology world.

And the thing that I think Facebook is most motivated by is not losing. So you can throw all the regulations and all that stuff at them, but I don't really think they care because they have such a global footprint. But irrelevance, that is far more concerning, I think, to Zuckerberg and not surfing the behavior of the next generation and building products for that generation. And what I wonder is introducing money into this for the creator economy may not be something that is native to, I don't know, know, his sensibilities. You know, when he started the Facebook back in 2004, he was like watching people wanting to like, I don't know, it's like dogs sniffing each other's butts. Like, he was sort of building products for that, you know, where the humans are the dogs. And now this direct monetization thing is coming out of like discord. It's coming out of Asia. It's coming out

of a bunch of other spots where, and I don't know, like as the, you know, sort of executive the CEO, I wonder if he's too disconnected from the generation that's coming up using these, these tools and platforms today? I, that's probably, there's an element of truth there, I'm sure. But I actually think it's the business side of Facebook that will be the hardest to turn here

just because it's so massive. Like the Cheryl's side of the house. The product side, and Mark is very willing to adapt and change course. We sing this time and time again with stories and everything else. Mark doesn't really like advertising.

Like he'd rather be doing just like product stuff direct I think this is more like in line with his vision of like people directly supporting each other but yeah it's like can you do both I don't we haven't seen that from a big internet company where they've effectively done advertising and direct payments at scale in a way that makes sense I mean they could be mutually reinforcing things though because yeah like you had said earlier you get a lot of like targeting data and cohort data and you know with shopping attribution data layered in and

And so, you know, it could all could be a nice flywheel for them, but it's a lot of spinning plates. And the company, Facebook size, it's very hard to execute on all that at once in a way that makes sense. Hey, Alex, one more thing. And then we should let you go, too. It is the middle of the workday. To how, I don't mean this as crassly as it's going to come out, but how scared of they, Facebook, how scared of TikTok are they right now? Not scared, like, oh, that's going to ruin us, but like, how much is this getting their competitive juices going right now? I think I hear this all the time.

Like, people ask me, Facebook, TikTok. Like, everyone should be thinking about the fact that Google is the one who is freaked out about TikTok. Yeah, I was going to ask about that. Google and YouTube are, like, TikTok is YouTube if it was reinvented for mobile. So, like, Facebook never actually had a strong presence in that space. They've been trying for years and it hasn't worked. Like they care about it in the sense that time spent moves to one app. That is time in the day that doesn't go to Facebook.

So they care about it in that way. But like TikTok's ad business is incredibly nascent. They're not stealing like the long tail of Facebook's like S&Bs at all. So like that's not a threat. If you're using TikTok, it's not like you're going to delete Instagram. They're not like, you know, totally competitive products that overlap. Right. I mean, maybe over time.

But like, no, if anything, like, we should be talking about, like, this is an existential threat to YouTube. And, like, it's TikTok is YouTube for the mobile generation. So they care about it and that they need the inventory and they need the eyeballs. But I just think it's like this place to say TikTok is like Facebook's number one problem. I think it's YouTube's number one problem. Interesting. We don't really hear YouTube like in the same breath as, you know, we hear Instagram. and TikTok and all that competitive energy.

They have this shorts thing. They have this shorts thing that I actually broke the news about it. They were working on it. I remember early last year. And now I think they rolled it out to everyone recently. And I don't think it's, I mean, they say things well. I mean, like, are people just repurposing their TikToks? It's like mobile, full screen, you know, YouTube videos that you can swipe through.

But, you know, their legacy is horizontal videos, right? Yeah. What I think is interesting is specifically with YouTube, and I think it was... This is Remy, by the way. A reminder, this is being recorded, and we're going to publish it later. Go ahead. Yeah, my name is Remy. I was watching a Connoissemer video, and I think they were talking about shorts.

And they actually... I may be misdributing, but there was a discussion about how shorts, the behavior around shorts, was more like the advertisements that would pop up between TV shows rather than the actual content itself. Like the shorts were almost like advertisements for the YouTube channels. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it's sort of like fleets and tweets, right?

Like, yeah. It's the wrong motivation. So like in a pre-anitrust, big tech is bad America. What would have happened, it would have been, it would happen like clockwork is Google would have bought TikTok

before it got big. Yeah. They would have kept it separate. And it would have worked and it would have been the future of YouTube. And now it's kind of like, well, Can they really retrain the user base to do this?

People already think of TikTok for this. Creators don't go to YouTube for this. I haven't seen many successful pivots like that. I think creators make too much money with the existing solutions that YouTube has, right? So trying to... I mean, they'll throw billions of dollars into getting people to try to do shorts because it's the format that works better. Right? But like, right.

And so like it's a matter of whether they can successfully do that and whether creators want to do it whether people think of going to YouTube in the same way they think of going to TikTok. And so I don't know. Like honestly, like the thing that is going to make these big companies compete the most is just how chilling they, they, everyone is about like antitrust and like doing deals. Like they can't buy anything. So they have to actually, they have to actually invent things or copy things effectively. And that's going to be, that could be like their long term, you know, demise is like Google, Facebook. They can't buy the next TikTok.

Or the opposite way to look at it is all of a sudden the competitive marketplace is freed up from being kneecapped, as I always say. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think that's the same thing. Yeah, totally. Like, it's the best thing for Snap, for Discord, for Twitter, for Patreon. Like, Facebook can't just, like, write you a check for 3X, what you raised last, you know? Discord is literally the perfect example right now. I know Microsoft kick the tires on that, but Discord would have been bought 12 months, 18 months ago.

And now it's funny when it's funny to use this term. They're forced to have to find their own path. You know what I mean? And I feel like there's certain ways that that's more positive and these things go in cycles and things like that. But yeah, it'll be interesting that a company like Discord is going to have to go it alone and find its own way, which it wouldn't under other circumstances. And this conversation just reinforces kind of what I hinted at earlier that I have yet to see a compelling argument for why Facebook is a monopoly. And I know that's probably not going to go over well with people in this room or who are on Twitter generally. But there is no argument I've seen on the consumer side for Facebook being a monopoly.

there is potentially an argument on the advertising side, but again, they're a duopoly. They probably don't have 50% market share in any country they operate in in terms of advertising revenues. So that's going to be an interesting case. One thing that might be useful here, because I actually totally agree with you, is really about anti-competitive isn't even like the right framing. It's sort of more like everyone's a discount. And Facebook and whoever else sort of is in those powerful positions that prices and they can raise prices as much as they want because they have such a captive

audience and no one else has that audience. But there are many audiences now, whether it is TikTok, whether it is Twitter, whether it's Facebook, whether it's Discord. There are many of these that are all offering social capabilities on the internet. And you can go around and you can choose where you want to place your ads. I guess like the remedies or the things that have been proposed, even with the legislation, whether it's interoperable, or whether it's breaking them up or spinning off different companies, I don't know that it's going to cause the same, or the outcomes that people think it's going to cause. No, it's trying to fix a feeling of like badness, like these are bad with like a blood instrument. Yeah, and it's just vague.

And I have, yeah, I just have to, I've yet to see a clear argument. Ben Thompson has written a lot about this and I think a way that makes a lot of sense to me. I just like this is, these are very fluid networks that can easily be disrupted on the user side. maybe not on the advertising side. I mean, we saw this with Apple and the ad changes. Facebook's rates for ads, like shot through the roof. And that's with worse data. And that's just because, like, they are the place you have to go to advertise.

And so they can just, like, raise their rates, even when, like, their product gets worse, which is, that is a good sign that you may have monopolistic power in an industry. But in terms of, like, the user side, I haven't seen it. Yeah, I would agree with that. Brian? Where do you go? Oh, yeah, sorry. Alex, again, I'm going to offer you the opportunity to bow out gracefully right now. We're probably going to go another 10 or 15 minutes, which you can stick around for you.

What are you guys talking about next? You know what? This is a little left field because I know this is sensitive to Chris, but I talked about that idea of the Twitter verification thing real quick. Okay. And Chris, you heard me say that, like, you know, I looked into. it because I'm not verified. It wasn't worth it. And there were bots that got verified. There was four of them or something. There was bots that got verified. But my main question is, because I said, I was like all the things that I had to do. You call me a bot? Is that really what you're saying? No, no, I'm saying.

I'm saying this is sensitive to you because I know people come at you all the time to like get verified or to get your username or these things like that. The hoops that I had to jump through, like it's literally if you're a journalist or whatever. Like, oh, things with bylines and things like that. And then I see all these people that I know and trust and follow that don't get approved. Like, is it worth jumping through these hoops? Do I get anything? This is just a question that maybe people have had for you. years about Twitter. If I got a blue check, what does that mean? Do I get more followers? What happens?

You know, it's a good question. And I was verified like many years ago. And it was not through the same process that you went through. I do think that they're trying to make it, I don't know, somewhat more fair. Honestly, it's like a row in a database or like a column. And it's like turned on or off. And it really, on the one hand, isn't that meaningful. And yet it feels like you've been, you know, anointed by the platform as being, you know, a real boy. sort of like being Pinocchio most of your life. And then something is like, oh. Right. But it's, it's, what you're saying is it's not you automatically get put into the

suggested follow thing or anything like that. There's nothing like that. However, I think from a search perspective and from an interaction perspective. And, you know, the purpose of the feature was to disambiguate between, you know, fake accounts or parody accounts and the real person, right? And so the reason why you'd want to get verified if there are multiples of you. Now, thank God, the other Christmas scene a half. Hasn't other Christmasina has not joined social media.

And so I get all of his mentions whenever he shows up in a movie or whatever. But like if he were to join, there would be a real, you know, kind of fight probably between us because, I mean, I'm notorious, but he's actually notorious, you know, in like a movie kind of sense. And so I'm not sure who would win in terms of being more verifiable. I'm a little bit verifiable, I suppose. But regardless, I think it's just from a search perspective, you know, either helps amplify the signal that, yes, is who you think it is or it's not. I do think that actually a better solution, which I hope is where they're going with this, is to add more credentials or to say, you know, yes, this person

actually does work for the Washington Post or works for the verge or whatever. That would be interesting, but I haven't seen too much of that. Although, actually, I will say that I discovered something and there's been a little bit of buzz about it where Twitter is working on Twitter for professionals. And so you'll be able to set your account as either a creator or a professional, and then identify and associate yourself with different credentials in that sense. What if you're a professional creator? Are we talking about like a LinkedIn-type history thing? Or is this more like the Instagram type of change your account and how you see it?

More like that, I think. I think that's actually a good anchor. And for those who don't know, Instagram allows you to choose to be a professional and then to have sort of a, you know, to choose what page type you have. Instagram, I'm sorry, Twitter only, of course, has one sort of account type. but increasingly they will have several other types, including whether you're a bot or automated account versus, you know, like a weather bot or whatever, or if you are a professional or a state actor, they started doing this last year where they were identifying people who were government representatives or representatives of the CDC. So you can imagine that infrastructure allows them to create all sorts of

different demarcations to say this account is of this type. And so rolling that out makes sense. the problem is how do you do that scale? How do you actually evaluate who someone says they are and how long does that credential last? If someone leaves a job or they transition, are they still identified as being a state actor or whatever? Well, we can see like Twitter shut down the verification process pretty shortly after they reopened it for that very reason. It's impossible. And so it's like what you're saying is exactly what I think they want it to be, which is verification is just a means of verifying that you are who you say you are because Twitter has such a bot problem and an imposter problem and coordinated like, you know, astroturf problem.

And so, like, yeah, that should be what it is. Is, like, if you're verified, not only do we know it's you, but you get privileges in the network that non-verified accounts don't. Like, you get, maybe you can contribute to Birdwatch, which is their version of, like, Wikipedia for, like, you know, fact-checking things. Like, you know, there's all kinds of ways you could just, like, segment the audience that way, and you could actually have a healthier network if everyone is verified. but no platform has done as well.

You know, I see Jane in the room, and so maybe she has thoughts on this. But she makes me think of the fact that we're earlier than we usually are by about six hours. So if people that are in Europe or Asia that have never been able to participate, if you want to ask a question about anything, please raise your hand and Chris will bring you up. But let me just ask this. wasn't the point of the new verification program that it was? Didn't they count that these are human beings that are going to be making these calls, which is why it's confusing that all those bots got verified? Yes. I would love to know the backstory behind that, right? Because basically you had

four different accounts, all with the same followers. They hadn't tweeted once, and yet they got approved. Now, I will say, actually, there was, oh, who did I, I heard someone, maybe Brian, it was you talking about this, where previously Instagram actually had a number of inside jobs, you where people would go in and, you know, they worked for the company. It was Alex Stamos that said that, which he was in the room earlier, but I don't see him now. But anyway, yeah, he said that that happened at Instagram a couple years ago. Well, it happened to me, you know, where my account on Instagram actually got hacked because, actually, this was someone who worked at AT&T.

They gave away my SIM, which gave access to my phone number, which allowed someone else who bought my SIM to reset my two-factor authentication, and then to take over my account. So this is why I don't use phone number SMS verification anymore. But regardless, if that was something that happened here, you can imagine that those accounts actually could be sold on the black market or whatever with those blue checks, which provides some kind of, again, validation that they're legit. Now, I don't know what's going to happen in terms of protecting accounts going forward. Because like you said, if you are identified and given special privileges or access,

what happens if that account gets recycled or hacked or whatever? So there are a lot of layers to this that I don't know if the internet is quite ready for where to go. But it seems inevitable. Okay, well, I brought up some folks, actually, Nima, who also, like Jane, loves to dig into apps and reverse engineer them, I think might have something to say about verification. Is it right? Hello, guys. Can you hear me? Yep, yep.

And good night here. here it is night and maybe good evening or good afternoon there. So you're in Iran, yes? Yeah. Okay. So what have you seen so far in terms of the verification stuff? And as you said, a verification in the Twitter database is not really something very interesting. That's only a column.

And as I realized that column two only on my client. And it was a Boolean variable and that it was true or false and then you change it, for example, to true. The Twitter shows a verification badge on your Twitter account. And I also noticed there is something, a new feature that I didn't tweet and saw that today. And something about a boutique for education. I don't know what is that or. Yes. blue check mark for education.

Got it for 8. Oh, interesting. Huh. Yeah, I don't know was the purpose of that because there wasn't something about that or there wasn't a many code about that.

But I only saw that. There is two lines of code about something like Blue Checkmark or Education and I think there's going to be a new feature, but I'm not about it, I'm only guessing. Wow. Interesting.

By the way, just for context, for folks who are not following Nima, I don't know when you and I started talking, but some of us have, let's say, a hobby of trying to sluth into what's happening next. And Nima has been actually, what was the thing that you just discovered the other day that was new and interesting? Was it the Twitter professionals thing? No. In fact, I didn't

reiss engineer the Twitter professionals, but I did a recent engineer the newsletter The newsletter's on the profile. That's right. Yep.

Yeah, exactly. And it was really, in fact, popular too. And one of the best things that I ever had was when I looked at the newspaper

over country and I saw my name is on the newspaper. What? That's amazing. Yeah, exactly. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you.

that was really, really, really, that was great. I know you've been working for that kind of validation. And even though, you know, I mean, so with all this sleuthing, can you verify yourself or it doesn't work that way? I tried to reverse and general verification form, too. In fact, I did. And in fact, there was a request verification button for me because, you know, I don't know how Twitter is letting people to request for verification because one of my friends has a in fact somehow oh sorry for that sound I think so out of our house was going to drive and yeah I noticed some of my friends

has a page and he is somehow fake on Twitter because he doesn't have a Twitter profile he has less than five followers and he has 20 tweets I think but he could see the request verification button And now I have about 400 followers and I don't see the request verification button yet. But I reverse engineer that and the request verification button was also available for me when I tried to do that. But, you know, only one part of the reverse engineering is my client and I can only open things on my client. And as you know, the other hand, there's a server, there's the Twitter server. And that's somehow more secure. And I can not.

Well, hold on. Let me pause you. I don't want you to, like, you know, get ahead of yourself. There are some Twitter employees in the room. And I don't want to get kicked off of Twitter. So, but nonetheless, thank you for sharing that. I want to just circle back to what Brian was asking about, though. Because Brian, you said that you at least attempted to go through the verification process.

You're asking, is it even worthwhile? There's obviously a lot of people who want to get verified. Jane can attest to that. But in terms of the actual value, I don't know. What would make it valuable for you? Are you asking me? I am. Or NEMA?

Oh, well, no, actually what it was was it's one of those many things. This is the whole reason why I never, what was the email thing that everybody used? Probably everyone still uses. Remember that you pay $30 or $40 a month for? Oh, superhuman. Superhuman, yeah. I never did that because it was like you have to get on a, call with us for 30 minutes.

So when I went through the thing where it's like, you need to collect four different things with your byline in them and links to them. Right, it's laziness. People like spend their life going after Jane and Jane is now up on stage with us trying to get verified and you're like, I couldn't be bothered. Like I probably would be legitimately verified and I just, I don't care. Maybe, but also once I saw that other people that should be legitimately verified have tried and tried it. That was the other thing. At least you don't have to pay for it, you know?

Well, but I might pay for it if in the same way that I used to download things from Napster that took three hours, you know, but now I just pay $9 a month for Apple Music. But that's the point is like I'd be more motivated to do something with it if it got me something. Okay, so Jane's up here, Jane, talk to us about your experience because clearly everyone, as far as I know, given all of your protestations that say, I will not verify you, come to you and ask for that. What is your perspective on why people see verification as being so valuable? And what do you think about the changes that seem to be happening? Like, like, by design, like, if they're able to like to make more part of the verification process, more self-serve, you might like make people feel like that there's more transparency into how it works. But then, but then as a

can see that there might be bias. Like, some women in tech mentioned that, like they, as I'm quoting them, that's a, that women in tech seems to attend not to be verified. And whereas, like, men in tech. Oh, shit, Jane. Now that you say that, the two or three examples that I'm thinking of were all women. And I'm even thinking of a very prominent employee at Apple, who is very vocal on Twitter that was complaining that she wasn't verified. So, okay, so then maybe I'm just not going to do it in solidarity.

Huh, to create more space. Yeah, that's reasonable. But I do think this raises an interesting point, right? Which is, you know, Twitter is putting itself in the place of verifying whether it's authenticity or notability or things of that nature. And there obviously is a question, which is somewhat subjective. I don't think there's an objective measure as to who deserves verification. And why should they be verified if indeed this is a way for the community to, you know, annoy certain, you know, people or accounts as being significant, you know.

And if this were actually, if Jack were here and he were talking about, you know, crypto and Dow's and stuff like that, you could actually have multiple people verifying each other for different reasons or purposes that are sort of self-relevant within, smaller communities. And actually, that's one other thing that's coming soon. I guess there's the communities feature that Twitter will be launching. I don't know when, but they're working on a kind of groups feature. Actually, oh, I wonder if that's how Kvon is going to solve the problem. What if you could, you could vote for it? I know that you could, obviously, any voting can be gamed, but like, what if, like, you could like pull your followers and like they could vouch for you and

things like that, I don't know. Yeah, no, totally. I mean, that's just the follower count, because like 0.05, being in the 0.05% of your geographic area, or I believe you're also your topic, I remember correctly, is that's one of the criteria that serves you as notable, right? So people vote with their follows.

Right. It's a thousand or something, right? Yeah. And what about the concept of super follows? Could that be a kind of a trigger to say, hey, look, this person has amassed a bunch of people that are willing to pay to get their tweets. That should be some sort of

of kind of validation that, you know, they are someone credible. Do we know if the counts of superfallows will be shown on your profile? Say that again? Do we know if the count of the number of people who superfollow you will be shown on your profile? I need the eyeball. Can you have something? Nope. Jane?

Yes. Yes. Yes. In fact, it is working to show the number of super followers on the profile as well as a badge to show that the user is super following you or that's a supporter. Got it. Okay, cool. James, do you want to add something? Yeah. Chris, I really appreciate you not telling

everybody that once you're verified, you get the black card. There's Twitter blue and there's Twitter black and I'm not going to tell you guys about Twitter black. That was a joke. Sorry. It wasn't bad. Okay, okay. Well, he said it first. The black card.

You know, anyways. I guess what I think is interesting about this is, again, where we started, or at least one of the things that we started with was about the death of fleets and about Kavon, you know, the head PM or the head product guy at Twitter, talking about how he's excited about new things that are coming down the pipe and that will perhaps address this problem of the high pressure of tweeting, you know, to a theoretical huge room of people who are watching you into a smaller context. And if that means that Twitter communities will be coming out in the next, you know, month or so, now that's actually very interesting. And especially if you have Twitter spaces that are more intimate because they exist in those smaller communities or groups, then that becomes interesting. And then the verification piece becomes a little less relevant because instead of it being one big content network where everyone's connected to everyone else, you'd have smaller spaces where more intimate conversations can occur. and there can be more direct, whether it's super follows, or, you know, I'm paying to follow you, and therefore there's a deeper connection, and the verification thing as a universal signifier is no longer as useful.

The other interesting thing around the fleets, which is kind of unfortunate, is that in going back to what Brian was saying about paying to play on Instagram, I know a lot of people would pay to become a close friend of people on Instagram, so that, the color of the green circle. Exactly. You would pay for that for like exclusive content. So that's so might like a missed opportunity. And maybe they'll kind of have another reiteration of that with Superfallows moving forward just to provide, you know, because I like that fleets area personally.

I use it more for Twitter spaces than fleets, but that's another point entirely. Lots of big stuff. Oh, the thing that we didn't even talk about, I'm sorry, I have to bring this up because, you know, for completeness, the clubhouse back channel. I was waiting for that. Yeah, which is, this is, of course, meta since I'm having a back channel with Brian over iMessage. Twitter Spaces is the flakiest social audio product that I use. And yet, because of that work, you know, it's, I have to use it.

And I don't know. I'm frustrated. I just, I wanted to bring up the Clubhouse Back Channel, which apparently has launched for the fifth time today, but actually it's real. If you download the update, you can go into Clubhouse. You can see there's a little paper airplane. and if you tap on that, it'll bring you into this chat experience. Very interesting the way they implemented that backchap,

because in one release, it was available. Then within an hour, they have another release that took it away, so it seemed like it was a back-end update. Now, everybody has it through that latest a version. And there's a bunch of different things that are going on with that back channel. There are different colors, different color codes. There is like, it's kind of like a little clugey as to how, it works. You think you're in a separate chat area, but it's like an individual thing.

And you have like an, it's almost like direct messaging the way it's sorted out. But initially like you're chatting with the entire room, which are not. So it's a little, it takes a little bit of a comprehension as to how that works. And then you get it set it up much like the Twitter DMs with the main feed and then like the Twitter, the message requests, which I did like that. Say it again? They have the, so when you go to the back channel on Clubhouse, there's the messages, which is like the messages that you are actively doing,

like your regular Twitter DMs, but there's also the message request tab. So there's a separate thing for when people send you an initial message that you aren't mutual follows with, I believe. I'm not exactly sure exactly what gets sent to the message request, but I'm assuming, A, the people that you don't, followers that are trying to send you a message and possibly people that you are coming in contact with for the first time. Yeah, I did notice that you can actually turn off message requests as well.

So if you're not in the mood to chat or whatever, then you can actually do that pretty easily, which is cool. Yeah, and I do like that they did that little thing where they added this little pullout tab. So if you're in a room, you can just tap the little tab and just slide the whole DM out. How do you guys, like, because you guys have spent a bunch of time both here and clubhouse and elsewhere. And I did want to bring up the change to green room and I want to posit something in just a sec. But how do you think that the addition of text, DMs, the back channel is going to change the character and the interaction experience on Clubhouse? I think it's going to be less a change to the interaction on Clubhouse and more the change to how the Clubhouse people interact on other platforms. I don't know.

When I was in the space, there was a lot of hesitation. and a lot of concern about the distracted focus because a lot of folks that were really adamant about not having it were like, you know, at least we focus on this conversation. So all the things that most of us like think is an asset, they thought it was a, you know, a lot of the things that we look at as a liability,

they start as an asset. No distractions. You just focus on the conversation. Now you have to monitor this other area as a host. And it's a good thing to have mods because we don't have co-hosting so people could check that. So I think a lot of people were concerned about the distraction of having to take care of something else in the process. See, I very much disagree with that because most of the biggest hosts were looking at DMs anyway.

They were just looking at it on a different platform. Yeah, I think that's right. I think the biggest possibility for distraction was if they made it the actual room. Like if the people that were on the stage could just send and have this parallel. And that's how it works with Green Room, right? So what have you guys seen over on Green Room? Green Room. That was from my initial reaction, so hostily and you've probably spent more time on

there than I have. Yeah. So Green Room is the typical side chat, which is like angle. Angles like the same thing. So it's great because there's links, but there is a distraction. There is another side discussion that happens. This is a little bit different because it's private discussion. versus group discussions.

So that's why I say it's a little bit more annoying if that host gets bombarded with a bunch of stuff. It's like, what am I going to do with this stuff? You know, I don't have, you know, it's like checking a bunch of DM, right? But in Greenwood. It's a little bit like, you know, if you've ever gone live on Instagram, or at least, you know, when I have, I end up with lots of randoms who show up on my feed. And most of them are like, yo, where you from? Where you from? Right.

I'm like, yeah. I get the same thing on Twitter spaces where people, like, I'll just be talking in Twitter spaces and random people hop in. like, hey, yo, can you give me Twitter spaces? I'm like, that's not. You know, it's fine. It's the internet, whatever. But what's interesting is, I don't know if you've tested Angle. Angle has a whole other scenario where you could actually upload distinctive content specifically to the, not only to the chat, but as a host, you could actually broadcast your video in the same area that we have the nest and that everybody is the same thing at the time.

time, which I think is a very compelling kind of experience for like a brand. We're talking about Engel audio here, which is another social audio app. You can find in the app store. That just sounds like Twitch. It is a little like Twitch. But I would say it's mobile first, whereas Twitch, I think, came out of desktop streaming. Right. Yeah.

That's a big difference. I do want to, okay, one more thing. And then I think we can wrap up. And I also think Brian is back, unfortunately. He couldn't hear us for a little while, you know, welcome to Twitter spaces. is about the, and I know I complained about this on Twitter, but Green Room became this place where it was just about kind of sharing or asking for diamonds or gems. That's their whole in-app currency.

They're not worth anything, but they seem to, again, it's their own version of verification. And instead of one verification badge, it's like getting thousands of verification badges, I suppose. And recently, in a recent update, Green Room actually, well, Spotify, redesign the profile to completely eliminate the account of gems, which people had been trying to build up over time because you create a game, people will play the game. So I guess my question is, or here's my thought, here's my theory. My theory is that Spotify acquired locker room because they wanted to acquire the talent, the platform.

Actually, it's interesting. Green Room is built on Agora, which is the same tech as Clubhouse. So they were able to probably accelerate their dev cycles by six months. and now they want to wipe out the community, essentially fumigate it, and start over from scratch, and make it more of a entertainment and music and maybe podcast-oriented space. And sports may or may not be part of that. I mean, sports is not part of, I mean, it is part of maybe podcasts on Spotify, but I don't think sports is what Spotify really cares about.

So, I don't know. For those of you who have, like, spent some time over there or watching these things, what do you guys think about that idea? I think, for one at a time. Yeah, also thing you guys. first. I think for the podcaster, it's like a godson because you have three different

components that work nicely together. You could have this engagement similar to what you're doing now, record it, get the recording within 24 hours. Yeah, that's true. Do the distribution to Spotify. So it's this whole nicely fitting

network of products that works very well together. A lot of the sports folks are already broadcasters and podcasters, so that fits into their mold. And then there's a whole new set of genres that are coming about. But I love the fit of all those products kind of having individuality, but they all come together like Voltron and they do some things together.

To Hoseleen's point, I think Green Room will be at its best, the more that it leans into connecting itself to Spotify's podcasting platform. Yeah. For example, Hosellina alluded to this where a lot of, even the sports guys, had podcasts already. One of the things that they had done were they had this little badge a system where if

your company or the podcast that you use has a contract with, well, previously a locker room but I'm assuming those contracts got transferred to green room. If your podcast had a contract with them, it would put the little pages kind of where the

mic, the little mic symbol would go. So when you on mute, you could see the the logo of the podcast you're associated with, right? So almost like we can see a verification badge here instead of a verification badge, it's the logo of the podcast that you're associated with. What I was talking about before with, you know, verifications, if not verifications, and it's like, you know, what are you part of or where do you come from?

Yes. And I think if Green Room leans more into that, to the ability to actually connect. So imagine if Joe Rogan could have these chats that popped up. up on his page. I'm just using Joe Rogan because he has a podcast. You could say call it daddy, but just because they have a contract with Spotify. Yep.

And go, all right, he's associated with the Joe Rogan podcast or somebody on his team like Jamie comes up for a chat and has the Joe Rogan symbol there. And then it also is directly linked to the Spotify podcast page. Yep. Yep. Totally makes sense.

I mean, it's going to be, what's interesting about Spotify is that they're one of the few that is willing to, or at least seems to have several. apps that are all part of the same universe. And Facebook does too, but I think that Facebook, you know, to Brian's earlier point, wanted to create like this meta app where everything happens in the blue F app. And, you know, in some ways that makes sense because trying to get other apps to launch

and gain Steam or whatever is very hard. What will be interesting to see is if there is a merger that comes together between the Green Room app and the Spotify app eventually. it's quite clear that Spotify cares a lot about contest and live shows and events and things like that. Whether it becomes part of the main app, I think is one big question that we should be paying attention to. One of the things that I did notice, I tweeted about this yesterday, is that inside the green room app, there are four different icons, depending on whether you're in staging, production, or whatever, and this is common when you're testing out apps.

But the icon was called Now Playing. It wasn't locker room. It was. It was a lot of room. It wasn't green room. And so you can imagine that maybe green room actually, you know, becomes rebranded as, you know, Spotify now playing. And it's the place to go to, you know, hear live shows or things along those lines. And they already list live shows on Spotify accounts. That's right. That's right. They do it on artist accounts now, but I don't think they do it on podcast accounts, but they have that infrastructure of like how we promote live events. And now all they got to do is like add a little button there that says, this is a green room. Click this button. And it'll take it to join your room. Yep, exactly.

other thing. Yeah, and they're doing a lot of great ad promotions. When you're on Spotify, you get ads for Green Room just to cross-bottnay. Wait, wait, are you saying if you're not a paying Spotify's subscriber? Yeah, I get ads for, yeah. I'm a premium subscriber, so I don't know. That's very interesting. So the other thing, too, is I want to make sure people are clear. There's also a verification on Spotify in addition to the affiliation. There's two badges that you could potentially have. One to be like SB Nation, for example, and then one, one's another verification piece, and they go through the same verification kind of process over there. And, you know, you have to submit an application, things like that.

But it was good to see that, yes, they're a part of SB Nation or some other place so that when they do host the room, it's like, oh, yes, they're calling. It's almost like having a New York Times thing on your logo, which is pretty nice. Yeah, I think that's more of that. That kind of verification means more to me, at least. Like, if it told me why Christmas Sina was verified rather than just putting your check there, that would almost be more about it. Yep, that makes sense. Okay, let's bring Randy up here and then we're going to close it up. Yeah, I think I just wanted to highlight one point because I think that's the one point, at least for me, that is the most important about Green Room.

It's really the monetization piece because social audio, at least like for Clubhouse, it's going to be very difficult to monetize. even Twitter spaces, it's going to be extremely difficult to monetize. I think Green Room has such a leverage over monetization from a podcaster and a creator perspective where now creators can double-dip and can have a permanent sponsor for their podcast, and then they can have sponsors for their Green Rooms as well. So I think to me, the revolutionary value here is really monetization more than the social audio itself. Wow. Completely agree.

Everyone, you got lots of 100 emojis on that one, so I think everyone agrees on that one. All right. We've lost Brian again, but I'm going to wrap this up. Thank you guys for joining today. Thank you to Lucas and to Alex for coming and fleshing out a bunch of our knowledge about the big stories of today. This was the TechMeme Ride Home Experience for July 14th, 2021. Again, Brian and I try to do this on the weekly basis. We did it a little bit earlier today.

We got a little more participation from the rest of the world, and hopefully we will see you. here next week. Thanks, everybody.