Let’s start broadly and just talk about the social media biz. What’s the size of the industry or what kind of money is at stake?
In social media? Well, social media needs content created by the audience. We used to call it UGC in the industry, user-generated content. Now it’s called social media. But user-generated content was a very small market before Twitter. Twitter was really the seminal company here, not Facebook. …
Twitter was the one that enabled everyone to have their say, and of course, all the celebrities came onboard, and that was a real seminal moment as well. … Once those people started getting on, and you realize, “Wow, I’m just one step away, zero hops from a celebrity, and I can reply to them,” that’s when it exploded.
It does change everything, because now the audience is no longer the audience. The audience is now the publisher, and if you’re good, you can really disintermediate the publisher and the news sources and go direct. And once you can go direct, that changes the whole media business. It used to be people who had something to say would go to The Wall Street Journal, New York Times or a magazine, Spin magazine, whatever it is, and they would be interpreted and then presented to the audience. Now, we go direct to the audience, and there’s no filter. …
Does this create just a ridiculous glut of information? How does a young person cut through the clutter?