So you sold Tell Me,and then presumably had lots of options for as to what to do next? A lot of people will go off on BBCs or angel investors. You decided to jump back in and do another start up.
Yeah. I didn't, I wasn't planning to start another company.
OK.
I thought I would do some angel investing. I really wasn't sure what I was going to do. I was pretty red of it, I'd been ten years at that point. And so, I thought, we just had a baby girl and I thought I'd just hang with family and chill for a while.
But you know what I found out was that, the way that I relax is if I'm on the beach, the first thing I do is get a notebook and start sketching out ideas. It's just what I do for fun. And so I'm just kind of addicted to it and I love product.
At TellMe I always lamented the fact that we did a lot of great product work in the first year in a half, and then the other eight years were spent basically just selling that. And so I became chThink about, well, it will be fun just to do a thought experiment and do some cool prototyping and the thought experiment was one where, I don't know if you ever written a presentation or an email and And then you had to redo it from scratch knowing everything we know today.
So get rid of all the sort of historical kind of cruft and think about something totally from scratch. Knowing where the social media is. Knowing the state of banner advertising and what's happening there.
This is before the iPad had come out.
This is before the iPads. Yeah.
You were really kind of ahead of that trend or whatever. You didn't know, no-one at that time really knew the iPad. I mean there were rumors of it.
There were some, like, rumors.
But no-one really knew that it would be that good and that successful.
Right, right. I had started thinking about my days at Netscape when we worked with publishers and the web and then my time at paper software where I was so into the whole idea of tablet computers and I thought wow! I looked at magazines and I looked at an pulling Time magazine, and it looks so beautiful, and then you look at the same article on a website and just a shadow of itself.
I thought why is that? Why are we still living in the mid to late 90's in terms of these web templates? And then, what's the deal with advertising?
I mean advertising is actually making the whole experience worse. Everybody hates the ads. Nobody really clicks on them. They are infinite inventories. So of course basic economics say that of course these ads are not going to be worth very much.
And so now we're talking about pay walls and we are in a really problematic time for the web, and I thought it would be great to reimagine it in the realm of social media, in a realm where you have things like HTML 5 emerging.
And I thought about specifically a tablet type of form factor and magazine, sort of re-creating some of the aesthetics of a magazine, the content's always there, you don't have to wait for anything to load. You can just sort of flip through things. It looks beautiful. There's a sIt looks different, and if you ask people who have magazines, you know, hey, like Mountain Biking Magazine, you know, do you want one without the ads or one with the ads.
Which one you are going to plunk down four dollars for? And they all want the one with the ads. But then, if you ask...
Well, isn't like, Lucky Magazine just like all ads? Or People.
Well, yeah. Or Vogue for example. You know, Vogue has 1.2 million circulation and they make 3, in the US, they make $300 million a year in just advertising alone against that. In the US. I mean, it's amazing.
So, I think that there's an opportunity here to, you know, tenex the web in terms of advertising, to make the content far more beautiful. And I think the technology trends around social media, HTML5 and the iPad, are enabling that role to finally start to happen and I thought, wow, we could play role in that.
And it felt to me...it's interesting. I think a lot of iPad and iPhone apps feel to me like they're just ports of the web-based version.
Yeah right, that's right.
I sort of felt like Flipboard was like one of the first, probably the first kind of the thing that could only exists on the tablet, like the true tablet native application.
I love hearing that.Say Apple made it app of the year or something right? I mean they probably loved that too. It's like you're really, truly taking advantage of the medium.
Yes, and I think when you're starting from scratch and you have the luxury of no installed base and you see a brand new device like that come out. Yeah, it is an exciting opportunity and so that's what we did. We did put a 100% of our energy into that. It's why we are not any other platforms yet right now, because we are so committed to the iPad and that form factor.
How did Mike McCue come up with the idea for Flipboard, the iPad reader that’s seeing more than 10 million flips a day? In these final two video clips from his Founder Stories interview with Chris Dixon, McCue says that he had no intention of starting another company after selling TellMe to Microsoft (which he talks about in Part I and Part II of this interview). He was tired after ten years at TellMe. He just wanted to take some time off.
But that was easier said than done. “The way I relax, if I am on a beach, the first thing I do is get a notebook and start sketching out ideas,” he tells Dixon. “I am kind of addicted to it.”
McCue did a thought experiment. “What if we accidentally deleted the web and then you had to redo it from scratch?” McCue thought magazines were beautiful, but look at the same article on the web and it is “a shadow of itself.” And the ads are just as bad. Nobody clicks on them because they are ugly.
His very first startup had been Paper Software, during the first wave of pen computing startups in the early 1990s, so when the iPad came along, he knew what he had to do. rethink the reading experience on the Web to look more like a digital magazine. Strip out all the extraneous junk, and you can even make the ads look good. McCue thinks the opportunity for advertising on the Web is “10X” what it is today, and a lot of that is going to be on tablets and HTML5 websites (which is why he recently raised $50 million for Flipboard).
The the video below, McCue and Dixon continue their conversation. They dig into some of the strategies that traditional print publishers are taking on tablets, iPad subscriptions, and the promises (and dangers) of content atomization. “Once things are atomized,” warns Dixon, news publishers lose the cross-subsidization that supports things like “foreign policy journalism.”
McCue thinks the key is to try to recreate the economics of print on tablets and the Web. One of the advantages to Flipboard is the speed with which it delivers new information from a variety of sources in a much more pleasing format. “It’s almost like an accelerated version of the web,” says McCue. “We strip out the stuff people don’t like about the web”—the blinking ads, the navigation toolbars—and replaces it with better typography and bigger photographs. There are many steps to go, but McCue is betting his company on that future.
Related:
(Founder Stories) FlipBoard’s Mike McCue: The Builder
(Founder Stories) Mike McCue On Surviving A Downturn: The TellMe Years
So what do you think about like the New Yorker yesterday or a couple of days ago started their, their iPad service and people seem to like it and there is other things that The Daily which seems to have had less success and so lots of experimentation is going on like New York Times switch to the pay wall.
I personally find there plans of, I mean, in the New York Times I find they had, like, 18 layers of served up, I can't figure out the pricing model.
Right, right, right.
It seems like this is a lot of experimentation and maybe.
Yes.
confusion. What is your vision for how this lend up shaking out?
Well. I don't think it will be a surprising to say that. I am going an optimist on this. I think that the world of publishing is going to come out of this state. There is a lot of things been good that already started to happen and a lot more to come. We are only about a year into the iPad itself and I don't think iPad necessarily Quote, unquote the 'savior' of media.
Media has to be savior of media, but I think the iPad and HTML 5 and social media are all super powerful trends that they can leverage to create a new kind of media experience.
And that harkens back into the high quality esthetic that they have in print, but is also still digital. And this is a journey that everyone is on. They are trying to figure it out, and everybody has different approaches. You know, the Daily has gone down the path of making, what I think, is a very courageous bet to say, "We're just going to do something on the iPad, we're not going to do anything with paper." You know, in fact, do you know heirNew York Times in New York, you know, the printing facility, its massive.
The parking lot alone, its like size Isn't just like classic innovators dilemma those still so hard to give up these on a cash cow business.
Yeah. Yeah. It is a very challenging call Even though everyone know this is going away.
Yeah.
But its like making all these money. So it's like how do you do it?
Yeah. No I know and some won't survive and some will and then there will be new players that will be come into the market. So we are going through a tremendous transformation. But I think that like for example, just look at the New Yorker, what they just did, with Apple is like now figured out a way to have a better subscription model that enables people who are already print subscribers to get the iPad version for free, right.
So just that simple step. You know, makes the whole experience better. And, you know, we have to get to the point where magazines, content or downloaded in the background they aren't so heavy weight and their mobile time.They are not seen as separate apps. That's another big issue like who wants to download an app to read one publication, right?
Also there is a lot of atomization that's going to be happening with content, right? So it is not only about the bundled form of premium content, right? That's one form that people will get the magazines and for example, but then other forms are the atomization of this content and you will get lots of different articles from lots of different sources and then hopefully you might find a source that you think is really great and you decide to become a subscriber to that and get the bundled stuff as well.
But isn't the atomization make it, I mean isn't it sort of like historical accident that the classified ads supported foreign policy journalism, right? Foreign policy journalism on his own, probably couldn't be a single business model.
Yes.
And then like I worry as a citizen let's say, is that like things like investigating journalism, foreign reporting, once things are atomized like you can't have sort of this cross optimization going on. I think that is an excellent point and there is still many open questions in with respect to the business model and how really great content gets funded.
And I think what I am hopeful of is that on the web, we were going to move away from this banner advertising model which banners impact the contents themselves.
They cause people to want to do unnatural things to present the contents, for example long form piece of journalism would be spread out over six or seven page views and you have to hit next page, and it reloads. And every time there's that latency in loading to a next page, you lose readers. And I bet you the number of people who actually get to the end of one of the articles is very, very low.
And so, and meanwhile people are pushing the management to these companies like drive 25 percent more revenue and so they are just doing whatever they can to basically sort of eek out whatever they can, with what they have. now. I think that what's happened with the iPad, though, is been transformative.
Because now people are taking a huge step back and saying, wait, wait, wait. Let's stop the madness here and let's think about, we do have great content. We do have amazing writers. And, you know, if we could just get the same economics for advertising that we do in print online, that would solve most of our problems.
We wouldn't even need a pay wall.
Meanwhile, the whole, you know, element of subscribing, you know, to content is way simpler when you can just push one button and now you can buy an article or a week's worth of, you know, a publication, or you can subscribe to a year. So the barrier to doing that is much lower.
And we know that, like, you know, people happily buy, you know, $4.95 a Time, you know, issue of Time in or The Economist in the train station or at the airport no problem, right? So how can we replicate that?
Yeah. I think also, like, what Apple did was they reset, you know, everyone was so used to getting content for free. They kind of reset expectations. Suddenly people were used to, started paying for content again.
Yes! Logically, it was a different, like it was a different kinda, like you didn't expect things everything to be for free on the iPhone and the iPad. Feels like it's a huge opportunity right.
Yes it is, it is and when the content is beautifully rendered.
It has to be.
And loads instantly and it feels more like that kind of print experience that people know in love. Then I think it's going to like I said, I am an optimistic thinker on this. I think this is going to be a big deal, still many steps to go. But I do believe that that still.
So your goal is to sort of be there should be one app and your goal is kind to be that app.
Well, our goal is to be a player in the space. So way I think about ourselves is you got the high end premium bundled content from lets say the New Yorker or Wired Magazine. At a new isle they have the website which has like a lot of sorta of real time logging kind of stuff as well as samples or you know pull our articles from their premium stuff that sort of mixed in.
And you may have some community Built content there etc. and then we sort of have the connector in between. We make it easy for people to discover content or share content and then to browse that content in a magazine-like format, even though it might be stuff that's written in a blog.
On the website we can make it look and feel like the pages of Wired magazine and then we can help them sell full-page print style advertising against that. That is many times more valuable than banner ads, and you don't have the ads then competing for the screen real estate with the content and blinking at you and stuff.
You have a far better experience and you also set it up, so one of the things our platform does really nicely is, all the content's just right there. You really don't wait for anything to download. It is almost like an excelerated version of the web.
We strip out all the stuff that nobody really likes about the web all the navigation tool bars, all the side bars. And then we let the publisher reinsert the good stuff like, typography, beautiful photographs at full-screen resolution. And then accelerated version of the web.
Yes. Well I think that were out of time but thanks so much for being here and My pleasure it was great to talk to you.
Great talking to you. Thanks.
Thank you.
Pizza Acasa
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