Push Pop Press (Facebook Instant Articles) with Todd Bishop

Ben and David are joined by Todd Bishop, technology reporter and co-founder of GeekWire http://geekwire.com, to discuss Facebook's 2011 acquisition of Push Pop Press. Sponsors: Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvantaServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredservicenow26Legora: https://bit.ly/acquiredlegoraStatsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26 More Acquired! Get email updates https://www.acquired.fm/email with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodesJoin the Slack http://acquired.fm/slackSubscribe to ACQ2 https://pod.link/acquiredlpMerch Store https://www.acquired.fm/store! © Copyright 2015-2026 ACQ, LLC Highlights Include: The founding story of Push Pop Press by Kimon Tsinteris and Mike Matas. The evolution of Facebook Creative Labs, Facebook Paper, and eventually, Facebook Instant Articles. Facebook's role in the changing media landscape today. GeekWire's experiments with Facebook Instant Articles, Google Accelerated Mobile Pages, and live video. The Carve Out: The Startup Podcast Season 3 https://gimletmedia.com/episode/almost-famous-season-3-episode-1/The Future of Technology is in Your Ear https://backchannel.com/the-future-of-technology-is-in-your-ear-8c276b810413#.3exij6vkd (Link to product http://amzn.to/1RV3CKM)The Risk Not Taken https://medium.com/@dunn/the-risk-not-taken-40cf0a8919cb#.8dznlr3zw

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ben Gilbert?

  Well, is it anti-Trump? Yes. Then I think we're probably fine.

• 0:23Ben Gilbert?

  Welcome back to episode 13 of Acquired, the show where we talk about technology acquisitions that actually went well. I'm Ben Gilbert.

• 0:32David Rosenthal?

  I'm David Rosenthal.

• 0:33Ben Gilbert?

  And we are your hosts. We have a very special guest today, visiting us from GeekWire, Todd Bishop.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Hey, it's great to be here.

• 0:41Ben Gilbert?

  So great to have you.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  I'm a fan, I'm a listener. I think yours might be the only podcast that I've listened to every episode of.

• 0:48Ben Gilbert?

  Whoa.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Which speaks to the fact you're still relatively new. But yeah, I listen on my walks on the weekend and really love what you guys do on the show.

• 0:58David Rosenthal?

  Thank you, Todd.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 0:59David Rosenthal?

  We're glad to have you.

• 1:01Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, it's a privilege. And for this episode, it's going to be particularly interesting. We're talking about the publishing industry. So we wanted to have Todd on because we thought it would be particularly fascinating to listeners to get a little inside info from someone who's kind of experiencing the results of the acquisition firsthand.

• 1:19Ben Gilbert?

  So before we get into what the episode's on today, a couple of administrative things. First one, please leave us a rating and a review on iTunes. It is tremendously helpful for the future of the show as we invest in better tech and we get more and more guests on and we're able to do more things with the show. Appreciate you doing that and doing any sort of sharing on social media that you feel is appropriate. Secondarily, we started a Slack community and we've seen some really great uptake in that.

• 1:48David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, it's been really fun to chat with all you guys. And please, we'd love more people to join, but for people who are already in, keep the questions and discussion coming. It's been great.

• 1:59Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, and we've got some email asking, "Well, how do I join?" It's on the Acquired website. If you're on desktop, it's a little widget on the right side. You just enter your email and then it emails you how to do it. And if you are on mobile, it is down below the posts. All right, listeners, now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture. It used to be that you prove that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF, then everyone would nod and you're done. But in an AI-first world, that doesn't hold up anymore.

• 2:32David Rosenthal?

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• 2:53Ben Gilbert?

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• 3:15David Rosenthal?

  In half! Which is exactly why more than 16,000 companies today run on Vanta. Companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Snowflake all stay audit-ready and catch the risks that crop up between audits across every vendor, every AI tool, the whole environment.

• 3:33Ben Gilbert?

  And that's the real value. Trust has to be continuous now, which is why Vanta automates your security, your compliance, and the work to earn and prove trust. We're huge fans of Vanta over here, and literally hundreds of Acquired listeners have become Vanta customers at their companies over the years. So you can get $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com/acquired. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash acquired for $1,000 off, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. So, without further ado, our episode this week is on Facebook's acquisition of Push Pop Press. Try that, try it, bleh.

• 4:11David Rosenthal?

  Say that five times fast.

• 4:14Ben Gilbert?

  David, do you want to dive in with the history and facts?

• 4:16David Rosenthal?

  As always. So, very interesting one here. The company, as Ben mentioned, is Push Pop Press, which not many people have heard of, but it was founded in February 2010 by two guys, Mike Matas and Kimon, I'm probably going to butcher his last name, Sin Saris, I believe. And they were both alums of Apple. And they had been a designer, one a designer and one an engineer at Apple for about four or five years, and they had worked on the iPhone in the years leading up to the launch.

• 4:56Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, and as a total Apple nerd, these guys are legendary. I mean, you look at their portfolios, they've designed everything from the, you know, the charging battery icon on the front of the iPhone for the first six software releases to maps to on the map.

• 5:11David Rosenthal?

  Ben, you're stealing my thunder here.

• 5:12Ben Gilbert?

  Sorry.

• 5:13David Rosenthal?

  I literally have in my notes. So, yeah. These guys, they weren't just any Apple engineers and designers. Between the two of them, they designed the first, the first versions of the camera app, the photos app, the maps app, the settings app, the battery display, the photos app for the iPad and Time Machine and Photo Booth for the Mac.

• 5:35Ben Gilbert?

  Well, I should stop doing anything from memory ever.

• 5:37David Rosenthal?

  Yes. Quite, quite impressive guys. And interestingly, while they were working on Push Pop Press, which was only for about two years, Mike was also working on the side. I don't know which was the side gig and which was the permanent gig, but he was one of the first people working on Nest. And nobody knew what Nest was at this point. But they were the secretive startup from former Apple folks. And Mike was also part of that team.

• 6:11Ben Gilbert?

  He was, and Mike's had his hands in really great software for a long time. He's, for the Seattle Light listeners out there, he's actually a native Seattle Light and worked on some really incredible Mac software that is pixel perfect called Delicious Library from Delicious Monster. That's right. With Will Shipley. And that, you know, as a, you know, yet again, Apple nerd and admirer of great software, is really kind of setting the bar for creating great UX.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  And one of the greatest startup names ever, right?

• 6:40Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Delicious Monster, yes.

• 6:43David Rosenthal?

  Indeed. So with these two superstar engineers and designers from Apple, they leave, they start Push Pop Press. What is Push Pop Press, one might ask? So at TED, at the TED conference in spring of 2011, they unveil at the conference what they've been working on. And it was an attempt to reimagine the book. What does the book look like on a mobile computer, both tablets and phones, smartphones? And the first book that they launched was in conjunction with Al Gore, who interestingly

• 7:25David Rosenthal?

  was an Apple board member and also, at the time, I believe, still affiliated with venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, which was an investor in Nest. And they worked with him to launch his book called Our Choice, which was about the environment. And it was an incredibly beautiful app. It was released as an app within the Apple App Store. It was only on iOS. And the technology behind it that Push Pop Press created enabled highly, highly immersive interactions with, again, really a reimagining of what a book was, with interactive content,

• 8:07David Rosenthal?

  with audio, with video, all seamlessly integrated into this experience.

• 8:12Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, and one of the things to note about that was, you know, it's Still not, it's not an easy thing to imagine a really immersive, beautiful, kind of perfect animation curve application like this. That alone is hard. The engineering, especially on those real early iOS devices, is particularly difficult. And these were kind of the two guys in the world that could build that, you know, envision that incredible experience and then...

• 8:42David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, we're talking early iPads and like iPhone 4, 4S timeframe.

• 8:49Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 8:50David Rosenthal?

  And actually, interestingly, now, we can't verify this, confirm or deny, but it has been reported in the press that this actually might have gotten into them into a little bit of trouble. Because apparently, again, according to some articles out there, we don't know if this is true or not, but apparently Steve Jobs noticed when these guys left and noticed what they were working on. And he believed that a lot of the technology that they used to build Push Pop Press was actually alarmingly similar to some of the patented technology that they had developed while they were at Apple, working on iBooks. So he, again, supposedly, got a little upset about this.

• 9:33David Rosenthal?

  Good thing there's no non-compete provisions in California, right? Yes, exactly, exactly. Well, this was actually an IP issue. Right. This was a patent issue, supposedly. So, this was, this was after they launched at Ted in 2011. And then interestingly, at WWDC that year in June, not everybody at Apple was too upset because our choice in Push Pop Press actually won an Apple Design Award for the iPad as being one of the best-designed apps, according to Apple, on the iPad that year. But nonetheless, very shortly thereafter, in the beginning of August of 2011, Facebook announces that they have acquired Push Pop Press for an undisclosed amount. And again,

• 10:17David Rosenthal?

  supposedly, according to these articles, the fact that Jobs was kind of on the warpath about this and upset about some of the potential IP violations regarding books and apps, might have contributed to the outcome here and not continuing to go along as a standalone company. No way for us to know.

• 10:36Ben Gilbert?

  Interesting hypothesis. I never, never took it there before.

• 10:41Ben Gilbert?

  A note on this acquisition, I think it's safe to assume that it's a pretty small sum. Not a big team, very early stage. But what it did represent, I remember thinking this at the time, I had bought the book, it was incredible to play with, had great reverence for sort of the technology behind it. And I was thinking, man, Facebook just keeps buying up and sort of, we don't know if this was an acqui-hire, but had done several acquisitions before of teams that were just incredible iOS designers and developers. And I was like, they really have a war chest there. And thinking back to that time period, I mean, this was still a great state of flux for Facebook in the mobile era. They were doing the hybrid web thing, they hadn't managed to translate their, you know...

• 11:25David Rosenthal?

  The Facebook apps were not native on iPhone and Android. They were doing the wrapper development, it was a mess.

• 11:35Ben Gilbert?

  Right, and their mobile future was uncertain with their ad revenues. They hadn't translated their cash cow from desktop yet. And as we know, they had become incredibly successful with the newsfeed ad, it's one of the best ad units in history, but...

• 11:49Speaker 02

  But you're right, there were times back then, I remember some, I believe, I don't know if they were public or not at this point, but there were big questions about whether they could translate their success into mobile apps and into mobile in general.

• 12:01David Rosenthal?

  This was right around the time there was an infamous Recode interview at the Recode conference, or, this might have been before Recode.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Probably was, back at the All Things D conference.

• 12:11David Rosenthal?

  Was this the hoodie? Yeah, the hoodie where Mark Zuckerberg was being grilled onstage by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. And he had a hoodie on and he was sweating profusely and he was being grilled about mobile and Facebook's missing of mobile. And he ended up taking the hoodie off and it was...

• 12:30Speaker 02

  And then it had that like, that Illuminati inside it. It was very cultish.

• 12:35David Rosenthal?

  Hugely embarrassing moment. But others have speculated that that was, that moment was the turning point when he realized that Facebook needed to go all in on mobile, and they really did after that.

• 12:46Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 12:47David Rosenthal?

  And this acquisition was part of it. Now, interestingly, and then we'll wrap up the history and facts here. As Ben mentioned, we don't know the price of the acquisition. We have to assume it was quite small. Push Pop Press had never raised any money. It was just the two of them and a couple other people who were working on it. But when they were acquired, the founders actually wrote on the website, on their blog, that this was just about them and the technology. They were not going to continue in the book industry. They write, "Although Facebook isn't planning to start publishing digital books, the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, giving people even richer ways to share their stories. With millions of people publishing to Facebook every day, we think it's going

• 13:32David Rosenthal?

  to be a great home for Push Pop Press."

• 13:35Ben Gilbert?

  Cough. Publishing cough.

• 13:37David Rosenthal?

  Publishing, not books.

• 13:40Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 13:40David Rosenthal?

  Interesting. So, yeah, let's get into it. I mean, just to wrap it up quickly. So then the team goes, the two of them go on and they work on two things that they're still working on at Facebook. First is Facebook Paper, which many people don't remember, but this is a standalone app that Facebook launched in early 2014. It's basically a flipboard competitor.

• 13:59Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. And if you look at this, this was the first thing, I think it might have been conditional upon the acquisition, but Mike Modis got to run Facebook Creative Labs, and this was kind of the product to launch out of Creative Labs. And the animations and the sensibilities from Push Pop Press's book are just like right there in Paper. I mean, the whole immersive design philosophy, very smooth curves between things. You can tell it's the same team.

• 14:25David Rosenthal?

  And although Paper, it still exists, you can still download it in the App Store. It's only on iOS, much like Push Pop Press. Hasn't been a huge success, but it informs the real, it was the Trojan horse to the real meat here is that this Push Pop Press becomes, and these guys are the product leaders of Facebook Instant Articles.

• 14:46Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. And I think Mike was and recently left, but Kimone, or I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce that, is still there.

• 14:55David Rosenthal?

  Ah, Mike, what are you doing now? If, call us.

• 14:58Ben Gilbert?

  I believe, so I follow him on Instagram. He's like a tremendous nature photographer, and he's doing a lot of traveling. I think he's taken some time.

• 15:07David Rosenthal?

  I'm sure well deserved, but Instant Articles is really, I'm sure many of our listeners know about it, but this is really game changing product that Facebook launched last year. And it was interestingly, Todd, I'm sure you'll appreciate this, the fact that they were working on it was scooped by David Carr at the New York Times in fall of 2014. And then it ends up coming out in spring of 2015. And I believe the opening line of his article where he talks about this is that Facebook is like a big dog in the park that is galloping at you and you don't know if it wants to play with you or eat you.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  Oh my God, that is so perfect.

• 15:52David Rosenthal?

  If you are a publisher.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. Boy, I'm in the park, man.

• 15:57David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. You guys are in the park.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  We are, we are. So in preparation for this, I spent quite a bit of time with our analytics, just getting a sense for what we get from Facebook, what we give to Facebook. We get roughly 10% of our traffic from Facebook.

• 16:15David Rosenthal?

  Is it the largest single?

• 16:17Speaker 02

  It's the largest, other than organic search. So if you look at organic search, it's, you know, close to half. But in terms of this, in terms of actual, you know, dedicated inbound referrals. So it's quite a bit of traffic. Now, in the old school publishing mentality, publishers would think, I've got to get users on my site. That is where I'm, you know, converting them into, you know, potential e-commerce customers or I'm getting them on my email list. Exactly. And I think Instant Articles is one of the best examples of that mentality shifting for publishers that are a little more progressive.

• 16:55David Rosenthal?

  And we should say a word too about what it is for people who haven't really dug into the product. This is a major change in the way. Content and articles that is owned and written by publishers is being distributed. So before instant articles, if somebody shared a link to an article on Facebook and you clicked on it on mobile, you would be taken to the mobile browser and read the article on the page, as Todd was saying, the publisher's page. But with instant articles, publishers are actually giving their content over to Facebook. It's being hosted on Facebook servers and then displayed in a very push-pop press-like,

• 17:35David Rosenthal?

  beautiful, immersive reader that loads instantly, rather than clicking through to the mobile web and waiting for everything to load. And even more importantly for this discussion, Facebook can sell and serve its own advertising within the article. Now, publishers can too, and if publishers sell the ads in the article, they keep 100% of the revenue, but Facebook can also sell in and then they keep 30% of the revenue.

• 18:03Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, and to put some numbers behind how much faster it is, they say an average webpage article takes about eight seconds to load, and people just bounce off that a tremendous amount.

• 18:16David Rosenthal?

  Especially on mobile.

• 18:17Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, yeah, and they say it's 10 times faster in an instant article.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I can't count the number of times when I've gone, "This is not worth it. I'm going back and finding something else to read." So I think that whole construct and that assertion of theirs is very valid, based on just casual, everyday user experience. But this is a mentality shift for publishers, because you've got so many readers on Facebook already, and the old-school mentality is, "Hey, we need to get them on our site." But when you start talking about the monetization, that's when it starts to go, "Okay, well, you know, to go back to your dog park analogy, maybe I'll let, you know, Facebook, you know, I don't know, I don't want to..."

• 18:53David Rosenthal?

  Lick my face, yeah.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Exactly, that's much better than what I was gonna say. Thank you.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  So, so yeah, I mean, that is the thing. We've actually experimented with instant articles a little bit, and I should say, this is part of a sort of broader set of these types of approaches. You know, Google has accelerated mobile pages, very similar. We've actually had a lot more success with AMP than we have with instant articles. Apple News, of course, and then Flipboard. You know, all these things are examples of publishers saying, hey, okay, the articles don't need to be on our site, but what do we get in return for allowing you to host them? And really, for us, it's the monetization. With Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, we have not yet seen the kind of user base that would justify

• 19:40Speaker 02

  putting a lot of effort into it, and because the revenue just isn't there yet. Google is actually a bit of an exception, because they're so integrated with DFP, DoubleClick for Publishers.

• 19:51David Rosenthal?

  Yep, yep.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  And it's our native system. Google gets it. You know, so in that way, I think Google may have a bit of an advantage in terms of the monetization, and then in attracting publishers in this whole instant article world. So that's, that's our view, yeah.

• 20:05David Rosenthal?

  Even though Facebook probably has a significant advantage in terms of traffic.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Exactly, yes.

• 20:10David Rosenthal?

  But Google has much better monetization tools for you.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Yes, for us as a publisher. But, but there's no denying the reality of Facebook's user base.

• 20:22David Rosenthal?

  I'm curious, you know, how do, how do you and John think about this? Like, you know, in, in the, we were talking before we started about, you know, old web publishers. Todd worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer. I worked at the Wall Street Journal back in the day, and, you know, I mean, the cost structure at the Journal, we spent a billion dollars every year on everything, putting out the paper and, you know, creating a website and all this, and it was all about, you know, creating that relationship with the reader.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 20:49David Rosenthal?

  And now we live in a different world. How do...

• 20:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's definitely changed. We talk about our publishing process, just as an example. We'll publish a story on WordPress and then every reporter for us, the next step is to go to Facebook. And you're really not done publishing until you've published a link on Facebook. And so obviously Instant Articles takes that a step further because it's just automatically populating that with the cached version, the Push Pop Press version essentially. So, you know, it's just, you think of your readers in a much broader way than just the people who are on your site. You think about other things too, like we've been experimenting a lot with retargeting and the whole notion of once a reader leaves your site, you can still serve them ads from yourself for our events, for example,

• 21:35Speaker 02

  or for your advertisers, on behalf of your advertisers on Facebook. So, we think about it as, it's much more holistic now. And in that way, Facebook has broadened the horizons, right? They've taken away the audience, but they've also opened the door for you to get there.

• 21:50David Rosenthal?

  Well, it used to be, I mean, every publisher, large and small, had their own ad sales force, right? And that was where a huge part of the costs, you know, at the Journal and elsewhere were. But the ability to sell that audience was so limited relative to a Facebook. And so now you live in a world where it probably doesn't really make sense to you for, as a publisher, to invest a lot in your own ads if you can just click a button.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  A few people back at the office are going to be listening very intently to this. So we have a, we have a strong...

• 22:20David Rosenthal?

  Well, but not to have a, not to have, you know, I mean, we had hundreds of ad salespeople at the, you know. I'm sure you guys don't have hundreds of ad sales.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  We have three. And the advantage there, obviously, is that in terms of direct sales, you can provide more value, you can provide custom packages, you can bundle in events. And so your margins are higher than just going through some kind of network buy. So, for us at least, at our size, there's still a big value in having direct sales.

• 22:50Ben Gilbert?

  Not to mention you actually know what experience is being delivered to your reader. I mean, you don't have to hope and pray that some network is inserting a thing that you want next to your content.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Oh, that's absolutely right. Yeah. So that is, the control issue is something there. And that's all about just making sure you're delivering the right value to the reader and to the sponsor. Yeah.

• 23:11Ben Gilbert?

  All right, listeners. Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team and deploying them is no longer the hard part.

• 23:25David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, the hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making. AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern. Like, the risks are real.

• 23:39Ben Gilbert?

  Exactly. And the challenge with AI is governing it, securing it, measuring it, and making sure that it actually delivers value. That is why ServiceNow built the AI Control Tower.

• 23:49David Rosenthal?

  Yep. AI Control Tower gives enterprises a single place to see, manage, govern, and optimize AI across the entire business. And it works with any AI, not just theirs. Every device on your network, every permission across every system, every AI agent visible and secure in one place.

• 24:07Ben Gilbert?

  And ServiceNow can do this because they've spent more than 20 years building the operational backbone of the enterprise. The workflows, governance, approvals, security controls, and institutional knowledge that power how work actually gets done across IT, HR, customer service, finance, and security.

• 24:23David Rosenthal?

  ServiceNow already runs more than 100 billion workflows annually and trillions of transactions for more than 85% of the Fortune 500. So when companies need a place to govern AI at enterprise scale, they're building on a platform at the center of how their business already operates.

• 24:40Ben Gilbert?

  And in a future that isn't going to be one AI, it's going to be thousands of AI agents working across every function of the company. But the question is, who's managing them all?

• 24:49David Rosenthal?

  So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely at scale, go check out servicenow.com/acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you.

• 25:00Ben Gilbert?

  For accelerated mobile pages for Google and for Facebook Instant Articles, do you guys do your own ad sales? Or do you trust the, do you hand that off to them and take the 30% cut?

• 25:12Speaker 02

  We've only done a little testing with Instant Articles, and actually, it's a whole other issue. We've run into a problem with the plugin created by Facebook and Automattic, the creator of WordPress. And

• 25:24Speaker 02

  This is, like I said, this could be a rat hole, so you can edit this out later, Ben. But they have some work to do on that plugin, and so we haven't been able to fully test that.

• 25:33Ben Gilbert?

  And that's the plugin that theoretically makes it easier for publishers, that Facebook can go in and automatically suck out your content, and then put it into an instant article without you doing a whole lot of work.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  That's right, exactly. For Google Accelerated Mobile Pages, just because of the extension from DFP, all of our ads can go there. So if we direct sold an ad that appears on the site, it can go into the, into Instant, or you can go into AMP, into Accelerated Mobile Pages.

• 25:59Ben Gilbert?

  Wow, huge advantage to Google on that.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely.

• 26:02Ben Gilbert?

  As a consumer and a reader, I'm much more a fan of Facebook Instant Articles, because you get this experience where I'm in a native experience, it's already downloaded all the content for the article, and I just go right into it. And on mobile pages, you know, it's always, whenever you're on a website, you're keenly aware that you're on a website and it's not quite native. And so whenever, for those of you who haven't, or don't know if you've hit an accelerated mobile page yet, it's when you search for something on Google, and there's a result that's for a news story, that sort of keeps you on the search results page, but there's an article overlaid on top of it. And I'm always a little disappointed, like, yeah, it's a lighter website and it's accelerated,

• 26:46Ben Gilbert?

  but it's still kind of a webpage, and it would be nicer if it was, you know, more native.

• 26:51David Rosenthal?

  A push-pop press-like experience.

• 26:54Ben Gilbert?

  It's interesting to hear it leg up.

• 26:56David Rosenthal?

  Let's, I definitely want to keep this conversation going, but let's do it, let's move into acquisition category.

• 27:02Ben Gilbert?

  All right. So even before you read their press release, I said that it's primarily a people acquisition, secondarily a technology acquisition. And it sure sounds like we're in agreement there.

• 27:16David Rosenthal?

  Well, I had primarily technology, secondarily people, but you know, it's all semantics.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd have a hard time disagreeing with that. I mean, my question is, what were they doing between 2011 and 2016? You know, if it was a talent acquisition or a technology acquisition? It took them a while, I guess it was 2015 that they came out with Instant Articles, but...

• 27:34Ben Gilbert?

  I think Paper. I think for a while they were kinda playing around with what is the thing that we're gonna build? And that was sort of why Creative Labs was its own little entity in Facebook before Paper came out. But I think the team for Paper actually got pretty large and it was a sizable effort where, I don't know the exact quote, but I remember Zuckerberg announcing it and saying like, "This is like a new direction for Facebook. Like, this is the new way you experience Facebook." And obviously sort of-

• 27:59David Rosenthal?

  And he was right. It just ended up becoming within the Facebook app.

• 28:03Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:04David Rosenthal?

  Which I think was interesting. The other thing is that, but like you were saying earlier, the core Facebook app was such a mess in those early days. I think it's amazing how much functionality has been brought back into that app and how big that piece of software has become.

• 28:21Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You wanna go, what would've happened otherwise?

• 28:27David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, well, I think this merits an interesting detour. Let's say they'd stayed independent and continued trying to reinvent the book. Good idea, bad idea? How does that play out?

• 28:39Ben Gilbert?

  Uh, there's no way they don't get picked up. And if it's not Facebook, it's someone else. But we'll all suspend that. Like, I think it's, they're so good and it's so inexpensive, what they've built is so interesting to so many players, that like, I don't think this scenario exists, but let's go down to what would've happened if they had kind of reinvented the book? You know-

• 29:02David Rosenthal?

  All of a sudden they're competing with Amazon.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  And they're getting sued by Steve Jobs.

• 29:05David Rosenthal?

  Maybe. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, like, it would've required, for that to really work as a business, it would've required content producers to embrace a, like, writers, authors, to embrace a whole new way of, a whole new medium, basically. And what's interesting about that versus what it became with Instant Articles is-

• 29:35David Rosenthal?

  You know, the authors of of content, publishers don't do anything different. It just Facebook sort of, you know, does its magic and makes it look beautiful.

• 29:46Ben Gilbert?

  And they can. Facebook wants you to. There's all these kind of unique things that you can do with data visualization and parallaxing, you know, images and things like that.

• 29:54David Rosenthal?

  But you don't have to.

• 29:55Ben Gilbert?

  No.

• 29:56David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. And I think probably very few. It's splashy when when when publishers do, but they probably don't do a lot of it.

• 30:04Ben Gilbert?

  Probably hard to justify the ROI on that.

• 30:06David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, whereas you would have to create a massive behavior change in terms of producers to really reinvent the book. So likely it would have been hard.

• 30:17Ben Gilbert?

  One way we could see that proxy for that playing out is with iBooks Author. Apple came out with that software to create textbooks and it's supposed to be exactly the same thing. Like, you know, things that move, things that slide, interactive ways of learning. And when they announced it on stage, you know, I was thinking like, this is really going to require some serious things that Apple is not necessarily good at. Like, they're going to need a lot of salespeople, a lot of relationship managers, like really to go and convince the five major textbook publishers, Pearson and then the likes of them, that like, this is their future.

• 30:51David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 30:52Ben Gilbert?

  And I just don't think they doubled down on that.

• 30:54David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, it didn't didn't work.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it seems like the other natural acquirer here would have been Amazon. Am I off base on that? I mean, just given the the books angle.

• 31:03Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, sure seems like it.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Or Barnes and Noble, maybe, if they were back, because 2011, you know, they could, they were still sort of in the game.

• 31:11David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, that is cool to think about. Like, what if what if Kindle were beautiful?

• 31:18David Rosenthal?

  No offense to anyone working on Kindle, but.

• 31:21Ben Gilbert?

  It's gotten it's gotten a lot better.

• 31:22David Rosenthal?

  It has gotten a lot better. I love Kindle. It's probably my, one of my most used apps and devices. I use both the app and the device, but.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  And the Oasis is pretty darn sweet.

• 31:33David Rosenthal?

  Do you have one?

• 31:33Speaker 02

  I've used one. Yeah.

• 31:35David Rosenthal?

  I would love to get one, but I just can't justify like $300 for.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And of course, e- Inc. is a whole different game than what we're talking about here. But but yeah, there's there's still lots of room for improvement in the whole digital ebook landscape.

• 31:48David Rosenthal?

  Yes, lots, lots of room.

• 31:50Ben Gilbert?

  I do want to raise the point, too. I think they had the luxury of being super, super selective.

• 31:58Ben Gilbert?

  Of if they were going to get acquired, who it was going to be by. They strike me as the the kind of people that if they didn't have tremendous respect for the company and didn't feel that their principles of of design and beautiful experience were sort of like embodied in the efforts of whatever that company was trying to do, I don't think they would have gone.

• 32:18David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 32:18Ben Gilbert?

  So I think that that.

• 32:20David Rosenthal?

  Especially, I mean, they they hadn't raised any money, so there were no, you know, evil VCs on the board, you know, forcing them to sell. But yeah, I I think you're probably right. And not to mention that, you know, was it Mike, I think, was, you know, working on the side or full time at Nest. So, um, yeah, this was not a, this was not a forced sale by any means.

• 32:40Ben Gilbert?

  No. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, Logora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work.

• 32:54David Rosenthal?

  Yep. It's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. Logora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?

• 33:11Ben Gilbert?

  So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done.

• 33:26David Rosenthal?

  And that's how you get features that customers love, like Tabular Review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Logora's bet here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work. And this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

• 33:50Ben Gilbert?

  And they recently launched Logora Agent, offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective, then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required.

• 34:09David Rosenthal?

  And Legora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early Legora numbers essentially speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Legora now has over 100,000 lawyers on the platform from 1,200 legal teams in 50 countries. And crazily, they went from 1 million to 100 million in ARR in about 18 months.

• 34:39Ben Gilbert?

  Truly insane numbers. And that is the real test. Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in-house at a company, you can learn more at legora.com/acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

• 35:04David Rosenthal?

  All right, let's, let's jump back into, to tech themes because I think we can really unpack some, some cool stuff with Todd here. What, uh, well, Todd, why don't you, why don't you go first?

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, this really does speak to the, the broadening horizons for publishers and, and the risks and opportunities that come along with that. I mean, this is, uh, I think a lot of, you know, I've been, been around since the days when I had one daily deadline for, you know, one story that needed to get to the printing press by 11 at night, you know? So, uh, not to, not to date myself here, but-

• 35:38David Rosenthal?

  I remember those days too, from 2009 at the Wall Street Journal. So it was not that long ago.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  So I think you've gone through a few transitions there for publishers, first, obviously to the web and then to mobile. And now in some ways, you're seeing a fourth transition to, you know, beyond your own property. What, what needs, what needs to happen? What can you do? Who can you reach? And how can you monetize it? And that really is the, the big theme for me here.

• 36:00Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, so Todd, I've had a crazy idea for a startup for a while, and I like this is the perfect time to poke holes in it. Could you start a publisher at this point that doesn't have a website that purely exists on on social? It's only on AMP, it's only on

• 36:15David Rosenthal?

  Well, one might argue this is what BuzzFeed is, but...

• 36:18Ben Gilbert?

  Hmm. Yeah, they have a destination site. I'm curious how much they're a destination versus social, but...

• 36:25Speaker 02

  I think you could, and I think you should. And that would be fantastic. I think you should do, yeah, everything but a website. So in other words, publish on Facebook. And The Verge has been talking about this, and I know, I think their new gadget blog is focused almost exclusively on Facebook. And I think it's The Verge. I get all those, The Verge and Gadget and Gizmodo, they just blend together in my mind.

• 36:49David Rosenthal?

  They're all good. I'm a big Verge fan.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. It is The Verge, right? Did the gadget blog just on Facebook? I'm sure the listeners will correct me on that one.

• 36:57Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, I don't, David, I'm a big Geekwire fan, so...

• 37:01David Rosenthal?

  I don't think The Verge and Geekwire are competitors, but yes, I'm a big Geekwire fan as well. But it's interesting, I, one of my themes was hinting at earlier is this sort of reinvention of the publishing industry. I'm curious how you guys at Geekwire, I mean, you're such a, you are a news site, of course, probably first and foremost, but there's so much more to what you do. You're a community. And how do you think about life and your business model in this new world?

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So I can share a few broad details. So about roughly 60% of our revenue has nothing to do with the website. And it's not because it's coming from Facebook or anything else. It doesn't have, it's probably not accurate to say it has nothing to do with the website, but we get event revenue. I mean, that is a major driver of our business.

• 37:48David Rosenthal?

  And you were saying, you know, your ad sales efforts are focused on holistic package, right? You're getting ad units on the site, but you're also getting sponsorships at events, and you know, it's, you're offering something beyond just a website.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  The way we look at it is that... Our news brings people to the site and then we create a community around that news. And then the question is, okay, you've got this great community. How can you provide value to that community and to the people who want to reach it? And if you think about it in that abstract way, then all these really interesting possibilities come up. If you just think about it as I've got people coming to my website and I want to serve them ads, then it's too simplistic and it's, you know, a decade ago mentality. So this is all part of that broader evolution and how publishers think.

• 38:31Ben Gilbert?

  In thinking about instant articles, some of the bigger publishers that have this sort of a trained behavior of a whole city going to their website every morning, much like they used to read the paper at their dining room table every morning. And they worry about doing something like this because it untrains that habitual behavior of going to the site. Do you guys worry at all about sort of losing that, oh, they don't, they're not used to going to Geekwire anymore?

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Certainly, there's a core set of your readers who will always do that. But so much anymore, the front door, the front, yeah, the front door of your website is not your homepage. It's an article that somebody comes into. And when we think about the design of the site, we think about that. This is really the place that people are coming to. So, and that's driven by social. It's the fact that people are getting the link off of Twitter, off of Facebook, and they're coming into your site through the back door, essentially.

• 39:23David Rosenthal?

  It's a phenomenon that I know I subscribe to, and I'm sure probably we all do, and many of our listeners have, you know, I don't go to the news anymore, the news comes to me.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  Right. So if you're not playing in all those, that whole entire ecosystem, then, you know, you've got to, you're taking a big risk. And there are some people who can do it successfully. And, you know, there's some, there's a great biotech site in Seattle, run by a guy named Luke Timmerman, and he's, he does $99 a year subscriptions and has built a successful one man business out of it. So there's, there's different approaches, but... For the most part, if you're going to be a holistic publisher in this world, you've got to play in all this stuff.

• 40:06Ben Gilbert?

  Hmm, hmm. It's interesting. So I was going to bring up, one of the tech trends that identifies to me is sort of the corporate unbundling away from core competency, where you can decide to take a dependency on a different business for something that you're deciding is not the thing that is unique and differentiating to you. And so, one thing that I'll bring up here is Ben Thompson has a great theory about-

• 40:28David Rosenthal?

  I was wondering how long we would go in this episode before we reference-

• 40:32Ben Gilbert?

  Time to Strategery in this episode is 32 minutes. Actually, I don't know what market it'll be, but he has a great theory about, okay, I can be a one-man independent publisher because I have this, you know, very sustainable business model where people pay me directly and I know that I'm not a destination site, so there, I need to run extremely lean because I only have, you know, this very specific business model that allows me to do that. And then on the other side of the continuum, you have the New York Times, and they can afford to do all things for all people because they have just all eyes on them, they're the first thing that people check. I mean, there are very few of those who have survived the Facebookization of the front door of the internet. And it's interesting

• 41:17Ben Gilbert?

  to see like, how publishers in the middle play with that. And I think, Todd, you raised a great point, that you sort of have to embrace that, you know, it's the world around our publication.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  I just looked, pulled up our analytics to maybe shed some light on this. So about 45% of our inbound traffic is from organic search, about 22% is from social, all forms of social, I'm sorry, 22% is from direct, and then about 18% is from social. So you get a sense for, we still have a pretty good direct audience there, but there's-

• 41:48David Rosenthal?

  That's actually crazy to me that organic search is still by far the largest.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  It is, and I don't know, that may speak to quirks of our audience or our site, but, and I don't know that that's the case for everybody.

• 42:02David Rosenthal?

  And that does not include direct?

• 42:03Speaker 02

  That does not include direct. Yeah, that's organic search.

• 42:06Ben Gilbert?

  That's the testament to the omnivore right there. I mean, I think as much as we're-

• 42:11David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, yeah, good point.

• 42:12Ben Gilbert?

  We're like-

• 42:13David Rosenthal?

  But Google is serving ads on, wow, just go buy some Google shares right now.

• 42:19Ben Gilbert?

  Nobody knows the difference-

• 42:20David Rosenthal?

  We do not dispense investment advice on this show.

• 42:24Ben Gilbert?

  We should probably be legally bound to say that more often, but we, you know, it's a, most people don't know the difference between, you know, typing in words and typing in a URL.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:36Ben Gilbert?

  And so they're, they're going to the internet, they're typing in the words, and if Geekwire is the first thing that comes up with the information about they're looking for, they hit it.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:44Ben Gilbert?

  And, you know, I, it's, it's interesting only that, well, the interesting nuance there to me is that more people are being active about the news that they choose to learn about, rather than reactive to whatever comes up in their Facebook feed.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:57Ben Gilbert?

  I don't think I was giving people enough credit.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. And like I said, we may not be representative of the broader trends out there. There are some quirks in our audience.

• 43:05David Rosenthal?

  That's fascinating.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:09David Rosenthal?

  But you, would it be fair to say that you guys at least have reimagined your product from being journalism to being a community, or, or like, journalism is the wrong word, but from being a news site to being a community?

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'd say it's still at its core a news site, and that's the thing. When you look at the drivers of the business, the, you know, doing quality news, trying to break news, that, that really is your ultimate competitive advantage. And that gets to what you're talking about, Ben. It's like, focus on your core competencies.

• 43:49David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Developing a social network is not, you know, my core competency. I was trained as a journalist, and most of the folks at the, the company were. And so, that, that really gets to what you're saying there.

• 44:01Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. And I think I should just say, like, you guys do a really amazing job of that.

• 44:05David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, we should say too, yeah, we are both big fans.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  Oh, thanks.

• 44:08David Rosenthal?

  Geekwire is, I'm sure for all of our listeners in Seattle are already fans, but for people who are not in Seattle, you probably also have heard of Geekwire, but it is a fantastic technology news site, and, and, and a, I think, especially speaking at Madrona as a VC here in the Seattle community, just a linchpin of the whole technology community in the Northwest.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Thanks. Well, and I should say- Only 30% of our traffic is Washington State. So Washington State is our largest individual market, but it's not the majority of our traffic. Speaks to a couple of things. First, there's intense interest in what's going on here from other parts of the world.

• 44:45David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  But we founded the site on the premise that Seattle and the Pacific Northwest deserve a national and international technology news site of their own. And so the traffic kind of bears that out. That's my stump speech. That's my elevator pitch. I'll be on a future episode. I'll be on episode 150 of Acquired, the acquisition of GeekWire.

• 45:04David Rosenthal?

  The acquisition of GeekWire.

• 45:06Ben Gilbert?

  Washington as largest single geography, but not a majority. You and Acquired both.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  There you go. Nice. Awesome. Perfect.

• 45:15David Rosenthal?

  We're basically the... We could do a merger now.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  We'll talk after.

• 45:21David Rosenthal?

  We'll talk after, yeah. That's not on the record.

• 45:27David Rosenthal?

  So, yeah, and the other... We've covered, you know, great tech themes here. The other one I wanted to bring up quickly is Ben Thompson, his aggregation theory, which we've talked about also on the show before. But basically is the theory that, you know, in the past, and it's represented nowhere better than publishing and journalism, where in the past you needed to aggregate distribution. As a distributor, you needed to aggregate, you know, you needed to aggregate journalists and you needed to aggregate delivery routes of newspapers and all this. Everything basically looking backwards from the customer. You didn't really care about the customer. The customer needed to come to you.

• 46:07David Rosenthal?

  In the internet world, you need to aggregate the customers and then all of the producers will come to you. And this is what's happened with Facebook here with instant articles. You know, they cater to the customers. They care about the user experience. They care about making it beautiful, which is why they acquired Push Pop Press, so that the customers come to them. The customers are their customer, the readers. And then the producers come to them, which is, I just think, super, super interesting.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  No, that's great. That's... I had never thought about it that way. That's... And it's true. It's completely true. And that's why Facebook has so much power. I mean, if you watch just the casual person pick up their phone, the chances that they're going to open the Facebook app first are so high.

• 46:51David Rosenthal?

  Incredible.

• 46:52Ben Gilbert?

  They they decide what you're going to be entertained by, and that that is a tremendous sword to yield.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, and and informed by, which is the whole issue that's come up recently with the the issue with the Facebook trending stories.

• 47:05Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, that's an interesting thing. Should we touch on that a little bit?

• 47:08David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 47:09Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, so for listeners who haven't been been tracking, there was basically, you know, there there are mixed feelings about how true it is. But basically, not in the news feed itself, but in the little trending news widget on desktop in the top right, or on mobile, when you tap into an empty search field, you see hand curated top news that Facebook thinks you would be interested in. And the news story that that basically alleges that they had talked to someone who used to work on that team, and they said it was anti-conservative, and the blow up from that has been unbelievable. And the the interesting takeaway is, boy, if the blow up from that little thing has been that big, that little thing that, you know,

• 47:54Ben Gilbert?

  half of you probably haven't even seen, and most of you probably have never clicked on, people give Facebook a tremendous amount of credit for having this like agnostic algorithm. So can you imagine if they were doing anything in the the news feed algorithm to to tilt one way or another? I mean, they they're viewed as like this arbiter of the truth, and there's this pure, clean algorithm that decides what you look at. And I think that that trust that they've instilled in people is is.

• 48:21David Rosenthal?

  A crack has emerged, though, in the past month. We'll see what happens.

• 48:27Ben Gilbert?

  Very, I think, very, very dangerous for them.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  But it speaks to their power, and it speaks to that that whole flipping of you aggregate the users.

• 48:34David Rosenthal?

  You aggregate, as long as users are coming every day to Facebook as a as a producer, as a publisher, you you have to be there.

• 48:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 48:42Ben Gilbert?

  This gets right back to what we said last episode, that their crown jewels are engagement, and it's it's engagement and time on site and just how much of your life you're giving to Facebook, and that's the power that they they wield. And.

• 48:56David Rosenthal?

  Interesting to contrast that with Snapchat, too, from the last episode, which is, you know, they've said like, we're not gonna, we're not, you know, funky algorithms, we're not tracking you, we're not anything, we're like. You watch the stories you want to watch and you follow the people you want to follow. And it's hard to discover things on Snapchat. All right, listeners, now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig.

• 49:23Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, there is a reason why the best product teams rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI-powered experiences at scale.

• 49:34David Rosenthal?

  Yep. In the crazy speed of today's AI world, shipping fast is just table stakes now. It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly. The real advantage is how quickly you learn what changes actually created value for customers and how fast you can use that signal to guide what you ship next.

• 49:54Ben Gilbert?

  This is where Statsig comes in. It brings experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics into one unified system so teams can ship safely, test rigorously, and directly link what they changed to how users actually behaved.

• 50:07David Rosenthal?

  So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences or just evolving your existing core product, go to statsig.com/acquired to get started. All right, should we move on to conclusion, grading?

• 50:22Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, yeah. This is an easy A for me. I mean, I think that they really couldn't have done any wrong. They, I don't think that this acquisition necessarily made it so that they were going to go this direction. I think that this is, doing something like Instant Articles is a natural course and they would have done it maybe just like slightly less beautifully. But I think, you know, great people to pick up. They were great leaders at Facebook, just talking to friends that worked with Mike. And I think that only, only good things.

• 50:55David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I, I agree. I'm just thinking, I think you're right, though. If they hadn't acquired Push Pop Press, they would have done this anyway. It just would have been less beautiful. So in that sense, it was probably really a great acquisition for them. I don't think they spent that much. I mean, we don't know, but they probably didn't.

• 51:19David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, I give it a, I give it an A too. I think what's holding me, what's nagging at me is, is there is an element of, of creepiness to it's to, to Facebook as we were talking about this crack that's emerged, one. And two, um, could there have been something, um, bigger that Push Pop Press could have been? I don't know. This was a great buy for Facebook, no doubt.

• 51:49Ben Gilbert?

  Do, do you mean within Facebook?

• 51:52David Rosenthal?

  No, not necessarily.

• 51:53Ben Gilbert?

  I, I think we typically, to, to lay out the criteria for how we grade these, it's usually imagining that you are a shareholder of the, the

• 52:01Speaker 02

  The acquirer.

• 52:02David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. I don't know what else they would have done within Facebook that would have been great. Um, so yeah, A, but I feel like Todd's got some.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  Well, what was the thing, did you say was paper that they worked on? What, what was the

• 52:12David Rosenthal?

  Yes.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  Inside Facebook? I mean, shouldn't that have been, if that had been like a runaway hit, then shouldn't have been an A? I don't know.

• 52:18Ben Gilbert?

  Ah, I didn't have the plus.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah, I got you. So I'll give it a B plus. I'll reserve the right to move that to an A if they fix the damn plugin. Did I just get two guys a, yeah. Did I get you a explicit language warning there just now?

• 52:32Ben Gilbert?

  No.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  Okay, I can say damn. All right, good.

• 52:34Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah. And, and, uh, it's interesting that the only, the only thing that I think could lower it, you're, you're raising an interesting point is, is this a strategically good idea for Facebook? Like, should they be focusing so hard on, on news and not just what you would discover that already lives on Facebook?

• 52:52Speaker 02

  I think it was brilliant strategically.

• 52:54David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, totally.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  I mean, the, the whole notion that they become the platform and they host it, they serve it up there, they're in control. From Facebook, Facebook's perspective, it's hard to see how it's bad.

• 53:05Ben Gilbert?

  So if Facebook's goal is engagement and they want to keep you in the Facebook experience and ecosystem longer, and they really want to be the internet to you, we've seen social, we've seen publishing, what's next? What else lives within Facebook that's not currently within Facebook that will be the next instant articles?

• 53:27David Rosenthal?

  Well, live, that they're investing hugely in, television.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  Of course, they did this with games for a while. It'd be interesting to see if that was reincarnated in a new way. Of course, virtual reality.

• 53:40David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  With Oculus.

• 53:41David Rosenthal?

  Yep.

• 53:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, live isn't a whole other topic.

• 53:44David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  We've been experimenting with that, too. It's totally changed the way we think about video.

• 53:48David Rosenthal?

  Oh, I'm curious.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:50David Rosenthal?

  What it would.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  So we've been doing live streaming and we now have a debate every time. YouTube or Facebook, YouTube or Facebook, and in the past month, the balance has shifted to Facebook. Because you just see instant engagement.

• 54:05David Rosenthal?

  Have you guys tried Periscope or?

• 54:07Speaker 02

  We tried that a little bit. Yeah, Periscope and.

• 54:10David Rosenthal?

  Have you tried Snapchat at all?

• 54:11Speaker 02

  No, no, Snapchat's one where we're not as advanced as we should be, honestly. And that's part of the problem as a publisher. It's like, where do you put your resources?

• 54:20David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  And it's like, there was that ad, the joke where the two executives are going up the elevator and the two bike messengers are talking about some hot news social network. Sometimes it can feel like that.

• 54:28David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  And you never know exactly when to jump on board. Pinterest is another one where we have not gotten as much traction.

• 54:34David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  But, but live.

• 54:36David Rosenthal?

  But live on Facebook has been big for you guys.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  It has. No, we're not monetizing it yet. Not directly.

• 54:42David Rosenthal?

  Is anyone?

• 54:44Speaker 02

  I'm not sure. I'm not sure if that's an option at this point.

• 54:48David Rosenthal?

  I don't think so. I mean, you could, you could hawk products while you're talking live on. But that wouldn't be as part of a Facebook product.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  And now Facebook's got the whole thing, too, where publishers can actually do sponsored content. So they sell the sponsored content and they've got the, in the Facebook business interface, they've got the little handshake icon. And so that's opened up new options, too. So I, long way of saying, Facebook is finally starting to make it where it's financially, at least worth exploring as a publisher versus just putting your stories on there and hoping that you get traffic back. That's the big shift that we've seen.

• 55:27David Rosenthal?

  And, and did you see that, you mentioned that with live video, there's the debate between the two. With pre-recorded video, are you seeing the same thing where you're, you're going, yeah, let's put it on Facebook and not on YouTube?

• 55:37Speaker 02

  No, we aren't. And in part, that's because live is just such an interesting thing to do right now.

• 55:42David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  And so. We're still very much keyed into YouTube. Although, no, I take that back. We do, we're now posting it on both YouTube and Facebook after the fact. But the reason it's a debate and either or debate is because our equipment, some of our equipment, you can't simultaneously live broadcast to both. Whereas you can obviously later upload to both.

• 56:02David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. What, uh, is there a particular, um, event or live event that you've done that you think is like really example of, of the future of?

• 56:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, um, we've been doing tours. Uh, so in fact, we did a tour of the Facebook headquarters here. It was kind of, it was very meta. And so, and I joked to Mike Schrepp for their CTO, I said, yeah, we're going to be trying this out on a little social network. He might've heard. And he thought I was actually talking. He didn't get the joke. He thought I was talking about some others, like total paranoia. He thought we were like streaming it on something he'd never heard of. And I said, no, no, we're doing it on Facebook.

• 56:39David Rosenthal?

  We're live streaming on down to lunch.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, but even just, you know, the quick stuff, you know, you've got your phone. Obviously that's fully produced. We've got a handheld mic and we're walking around with him. You know, streaming to a box that goes to Facebook. But just, just the whole notion of being a reporter or being anybody out there, being able to pull out your phone and immediately broadcast to a giant audience. Now, of course, this has been around for a while with, you know, Ustream and those kinds of things, but it gets to your point. Facebook has the user base and so it changes everything.

• 57:08Ben Gilbert?

  Yep. And it has your user base.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 57:10Ben Gilbert?

  It's people, presumably people that are fans of Geekwire on Facebook see this right at the top of their news feed when you're live.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Right. Exactly. So, yeah, it's, it's changed the dynamic a lot now that it just seems like there's been a cascade of, of changes over the past year, basically.

• 57:25Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 57:27David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. Facebook is investing heavily in all this stuff.

• 57:30Ben Gilbert?

  They are. All right. Should we, uh, get to the carve out?

• 57:33David Rosenthal?

  Let's do it.

• 57:34Ben Gilbert?

  All right. Uh, Todd, you want to go first as our guest?

• 57:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, uh, my carve out is actually another podcast. So but it touches on themes that you all touch about. And so I'm going to be very specific here. Gimlet Media's startup podcast. Now, I'm sure a lot of people watch, listen. Here's what here's the dynamic that happened with this. A lot of people listened to the first season, which told the story of Alex Bloomberg, the former This American Life reporter journalist, starting his own company, which was fantastic. And then season two, kind of sucked, honestly.

• 58:07Ben Gilbert?

  Didn't the dating ring shut down?

• 58:09Speaker 02

  Is that what happened? Yeah.

• 58:10Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 58:11Speaker 02

  It was, I personally, I personally didn't, I was not into that episode, that that whole season. I suffered through it. Season three, if you if you got lost in season two, go back and start again on season three. And I don't want to ruin it, but they do this great, they do a story where they they they tell the, how can I do this without ruining for everybody? They tell the story of a startup and its founding, and then do a reveal. And you they tell you it like, I think it's at the end of the second episode, what the startup is that they've been talking about. And it's one that it's one that everybody knows. It's one that you've you've featured on one of your episodes last fall. You you'll, as soon as you start hearing, you'll be like, oh, yeah, that's I know what

• 58:54Speaker 02

  company that is. But a lot of people out there won't know, like casual listeners not in the tech industry won't know which company they're talking about. So that's my carve out startup episode or startup season three, the first couple of episodes.

• 59:06Ben Gilbert?

  God, I love I love the teaser. I'm like, I'm on the spoil. This is great.

• 59:11David Rosenthal?

  You're a good pitch man.

• 59:12Speaker 02

  Good, good.

• 59:14David Rosenthal?

  I'll go next because it's somewhat related, unless you have another podcast?

• 59:18Ben Gilbert?

  Not.

• 59:18David Rosenthal?

  Is yours audio auditorily related?

• 59:21Ben Gilbert?

  No, mine are the words.

• 59:23David Rosenthal?

  Okay. So I have my carve out for the week is something to listen to your podcasts on. Super interesting. I read this article on back channel, which is part of Medium, which is Medium's tech collection.

• 59:41Ben Gilbert?

  Which is such a great name.

• 59:44David Rosenthal?

  It is a good name. Yes. And the title of the piece is called, What If The Future Of Technology Is In Your Ear? And it's about this, um, this Bluetooth earpiece, uh, that, uh, fits in your ear. It looks like a hearing aid. You, you really can't, it's, you can buy it in a variety of skin tones and you can't tell it's there. And it's made by, made in China by some Chinese company and you can buy it for like $11 on Amazon. I bought it for $11, uh, when, uh, the piece was written, it was $13. Uh, and it connects to your phone via Bluetooth and, and it, you can stream audio to it. You can stream music, you can stream podcasts, you can stream audiobooks.

• 1:00:24David Rosenthal?

  You can talk to it, uh, via Siri and the whole, the article is about like, the device is, you know, kinda janky like, but, but it's amazing for like $11.

• 1:00:34David Rosenthal?

  And then you can like, talk to Siri in your ear and it's like, it's like the movie Her.

• 1:00:38Ben Gilbert?

  I was gonna say.

• 1:00:38David Rosenthal?

  Exactly. It's that and it's $11 on Amazon. The article is really good. And then the device, like it's, I listen to all my podcasts and audiobooks on it now when I'm driving, when I'm walking, when I'm, it's just, it's just in my ear and nobody knows it's there. It's pretty cool.

• 1:00:55Ben Gilbert?

  Just wait till Siri's good and then it'll be, uh.

• 1:00:57David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, right. We're, we're, we're waiting on that. iOS 10 maybe.

• 1:01:00Ben Gilbert?

  WWDC, fingers crossed.

• 1:01:05Ben Gilbert?

  Mine is an article on Medium by Andy Dunn, the founder of Bonobos, or Bonobos, as I've, I've heard it both ways, called The Risk Not Taken. And it's this really great reflective piece, uh, about different points in Andy's life. One when he was starting Bonobos, um, and, and one event many years earlier. Really just about how, times when he's faced a difficult decision, but already sort of knew the answer. And, uh, he calls it that little, little voice, little, little something on his shoulder. And, uh, it, it, it shows up and, and he looks over and he doesn't recognize it at first. And then, um, he realizes, oh, my decision's already made and I, I have to go do that thing.

• 1:01:49Ben Gilbert?

  And it's a really interesting play out of the two different paths that you could go, taking the risk and not taking the risk. It's really poetically written, um, really, really smart guy and, um, You know, really great for any readers who are sort of looking to try and figure out, should I take the risk, should I not take the risk, or maybe perennially thinking about those things.

• 1:02:10David Rosenthal?

  That is good.

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  So what's the name of the article again?

• 1:02:13Ben Gilbert?

  The Risk Not Taken by Andy Dunn. And that'll be in our show notes or the show description. You can hit the little icon next to this episode and find the link.

• 1:02:21David Rosenthal?

  Before we wrap up, I think we need to talk about this for a minute at the meta level. We just did this episode about Facebook and Insta articles and publishing, and two of our three carve, well, all of our carve-outs were media-related. And two of them were on Medium, and one was a podcast. And these are all new forms of journalism and publishing that are outside the bounds of Facebook, really, in a lot of ways.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  For now.

• 1:02:51David Rosenthal?

  For now, for now. But it's interesting that like, just when you think the, just when you think the walls have closed around the garden, you know, there are flowers springing up outside.

• 1:03:01Ben Gilbert?

  Wow, speaking of poetic. All right, before we wrap up here, Todd, where can our listeners find you?

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  Geekwire.com. It's that simple.

• 1:03:12Ben Gilbert?

  Awesome.

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  I'm Todd Bishop on Twitter.

• 1:03:15Ben Gilbert?

  Also probably on Facebook.

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  And on Facebook, yes.

• 1:03:18David Rosenthal?

  Big thank you to Todd. This has been awesome.

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  This is really exciting for me. Like I said, I'm a loyal listener. I see the...

• 1:03:25David Rosenthal?

  Are you gonna listen to this episode?

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  You know, I'll probably wait a month. That's how I tend to do things. So, yeah. I really appreciate you having me on. Thank you.

• 1:03:34Ben Gilbert?

  Thanks for coming.

• 1:03:35David Rosenthal?

  Thanks for coming.