Latest news with #Channels
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Wired's editor tells me how she got 62,000 new subscribers in two weeks
News publishers weren't expecting a new "Trump Bump" in 2025 — they figured consumers had news fatigue. So how did Wired sign up 62,000 subscribers in two weeks in February? Katie Drummond, who took over Wired in 2023, explains. I write lots of depressing stories about the fate of media companies. Let's switch it up: Did you hear the one about the publisher who figured out how to find tens of thousands of new paying subscribers? That publisher is Wired, Condé Nast's tech site (and print magazine). And the strategy Wired used to find new subscribers is both super simple and very hard to pull off: Become a source for news lots of people want, and can't find anywhere else. That's the way Katie Drummond, who took over Wired in 2023, tells it. Drummond says she positioned Wired to specialize in breaking news — and then, when Donald Trump and Elon Musk joined forces after the 2024 election, she had plenty of news to break. On the one hand, that narrative makes plenty of sense. What Musk and his DOGE team tried to do to the federal bureaucracy was something we've never seen before. And Musk's chainsaw efforts affected millions of American workers and people who depend on those workers. So that's a big audience. On the other hand, lots of publications got a boost the first time Donald Trump was in office, for similar reasons. And the conventional wisdom was that it wouldn't happen again this time — news consumers were burned out on politics, and had already subscribed to everything they were going to subscribe to. So how did Drummond do it? You can hear my entire conversation with her on my Channels podcast — she's a great talker and well worth listening to in full. But you can get a sense of her strategy and tactics in this edited excerpt: Peter Kafka: In February, you guys said you'd added 62,500 subscribers in two weeks. At first I thought that number was a typo — publications just don't grow that fast. But apparently you really were. What happened? Katie Drummond: The answer is that our politics coverage — and specifically the coverage we started doing around the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk and his involvement in the Trump administration — drove colossal audiences to Wired. I've never seen anything like what we saw in February and March. That was where the subscription boom came from. Lots of publishers saw interest in Trump spike in 2016, 2017. But lots of wise people said media companies wouldn't see a "Trump Bump" this time around. Were you surprised to see that level of interest? We weren't expecting it. I've worked in digital media long enough to just always expect the worst, or just the status quo. Where the real surprise for me came from was that when we started covering DOGE, we started covering it really hard — like several stories a day, every single day, seven days a week, week after week. And after a week, I looked around, and was like, "where is everyone else? Why aren't other news organizations covering this?" I think that us having first-mover advantage on that story meant that for a lot of people, just out there in the world, trying to figure out what was going on, they saw Wired doing this coverage — and they looked at everybody else and sort of felt like, "where is the rest of the media on this?" A lot of the feedback we got from readers was "thank you so much for doing this coverage that nobody else seems willing to do. I'm now a subscriber." Did you feel that some of your new subscribers were doing something similar to people who subscribed to places like the Times in 2017? "You are fighting the good fight. I am signaling with my credit card that I like what you're doing. And I am against Donald Trump/Elon Musk." I think it was people looking for answers and trying to understand what is going on inside of these federal agencies: "This seems really wild and really troubling and really disturbing." Of course, we get anti-Trump sentiment in our inboxes. But it was less about anti-Trump and more, "Thank you for giving me information about what is happening inside the government of my own country. I appreciate that." On the one hand I can see why you guys would be positioned for this coverage: Elon Musk is a big tech guy; you're a tech publication. But Wired wasn't a place I would turn to to learn what's going on inside government agencies. How did you end up positioned for that? When I took the job in September 2023, I looked ahead at 2024. There was going to be a very consequential US federal election. There was also a record number of elections being held around the world. Elon Musk was not top of mind for me then. But generative AI was top of mind. Misinformation was top of mind. Everyone was worried we'd see replays of 2016, 2020, and that the platforms weren't going to be ready for it. Exactly. And the potential for more hacking and foreign interference in elections. It felt to me like, "There are so many different intersections with technology and with what we cover — we need to position ourselves now." I made a pitch to [Condé Nast] that I needed to build out a politics team. They were very receptive, very supportive. So by the end of 2023, we had that team in place. We started doing the coverage, and then midway through 2024, our focus changed when Trump was grazed in the ear by a bullet, Elon Musk endorsed him and it very quickly turned into a very different kind of story. One where we were able to bring a lot of expertise to bear around Elon Musk and the tech industry — how they think, how they operate. And with DOGE… I remember Zoe Schiffer, our director of business coverage — she wrote a book about what happened when Elon Musk bought Twitter. And she said: "This is going to be the Musk playbook — when he goes into a company, this is what he does. I think this is what we're about to see inside the federal government." So we positioned ourselves to cover it through that lens. Tesla stock is down and Elon Musk is much less visible than he was at the beginning of the year. DOGE doesn't seem to command the same kind of attention it used to. If people gave you money in February because they cared about DOGE, how do you keep them engaged in May and October? It's something that we think about and talk about all the time. The audience numbers on those stories now are not revolutionarily good — but they're still very good. And our mandate is to continue covering that as long as it is a consequential beat. We're going to stay on it. There will be more really big stories and really consequential stories to come out of what they are doing inside these agencies. But in terms of the community that we've built and all of those subscribers that we've added, now the challenge for us is to introduce them to the rest of Wired and what we have to offer. And to create new opportunities for them to really get to know Wired and get to know our journalists. So we're working on all sorts of things. We have been experimenting since late last year with livestream AMAs with Wired journalists, where subscribers can ask them questions. Thousands of people sign up and join those. This was the idea before the DOGE reporting really took off — to build Wired subscribers into more of a community and create less sort of a transactional back-and-forth. How is churn? I assume people who were signing up in February are more likely to stop subscribing than someone who's been with you for a while. Interestingly, our conversion rates are still way higher than they were last year and the year before. But our churn has gone way, way, way down. Among new subscribers, we're seeing churn rates that are vastly, vastly lower than what we were seeing in subscribers who signed up a year ago. Which is interesting. But again, it's only May. So we need to give that time. Sounds like you solved the whole thing. You solved publishing. I wake up every day assuming that I have not. Which I think is a pretty safe way to operate in 2025. Read the original article on Business Insider
Business Insider
6 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
How to save a magazine — with help from Donald Trump and Elon Musk
I write lots of depressing stories about the fate of media companies. Let's switch it up: Did you hear the one about the publisher who figured out how to find tens of thousands of new, paying subscribers? That publisher is Wired, Condé Nast's tech site (and print magazine). And the strategy Wired used to find new subscribers is both super-simple and very hard to pull off: Become a source for news lots of people want, and can't find anywhere else. That's the way Katie Drummond, who took over Wired in 2023, tells it. Drummond says she positioned Wired to specialize in breaking news — and then, when Donald Trump and Elon Musk joined forces after the 2024 election, she had plenty of news to break. On the one hand, that narrative makes plenty of sense. What Musk and his DOGE team tried to do to the federal bureaucracy was something we've never seen before. And Musk's chainsaw efforts affected millions of American workers and people who depend on those workers. So that's a big audience. On the other hand, lots of publications got a boost the first time Donald Trump was in office, for similar reasons. And the conventional wisdom was that it wouldn't happen again this time — news consumers were burned out on politics, and had already subscribed to everything they were going to subscribe to. So how did Drummond do it? You can hear my entire conversation with her on my Channels podcast — she's a great talker and well worth listening to in full. But you can get a sense of her strategy and tactics in this edited excerpt: Peter Kafka: In February, you guys said you'd added 62,500 subscribers in two weeks. At first I thought that number was a typo — publications just don't grow that fast. But apparently you really were. What happened? Katie Drummond: The answer is that our politics coverage — and specifically the coverage we started doing around the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk and his involvement in the Trump administration — drove colossal audiences to Wired. I've never seen anything like what we saw in February and March. That was where the subscription boom came from. Lots of publishers saw interest in Trump spike in 2016, 2017. But lots of wise people said media companies wouldn't see a "Trump Bump" this time around. Were you surprised to see that level of interest? We weren't expecting it. I've worked in digital media long enough to just always expect the worst, or just the status quo. Where the real surprise for me came from was that when we started covering DOGE, we started covering it really hard — like several stories a day, every single day, seven days a week, week after week. And after a week, I looked around, and was like, "where is everyone else? Why aren't other news organizations covering this?" I think that us having first-mover advantage on that story meant that for a lot of people, just out there in the world, trying to figure out what was going on, they saw Wired doing this coverage — and they looked at everybody else and sort of felt like, "where is the rest of the media on this?" A lot of the feedback we got from readers was "thank you so much for doing this coverage that nobody else seems willing to do. I'm now a subscriber." Did you feel that some of your new subscribers were doing something similar to people who subscribed to places like the Times in 2017? "You are fighting the good fight. I am signaling with my credit card that I like what you're doing. And I am against Donald Trump/Elon Musk." I think it was people looking for answers and trying to understand what is going on inside of these federal agencies: "This seems really wild and really troubling and really disturbing." Of course, we get anti-Trump sentiment in our inboxes. But it was less about anti-Trump and more, "Thank you for giving me information about what is happening inside the government of my own country. I appreciate that." On the one hand I can see why you guys would be positioned for this coverage: Elon Musk is a big tech guy; you're a tech publication. But Wired wasn't a place I would turn to to learn what's going on inside government agencies. How did you end up positioned for that? When I took the job in September 2023, I looked ahead at 2024. There was going to be a very consequential US federal election. There was also a record number of elections being held around the world. Elon Musk was not top of mind for me then. But generative AI was top of mind. Misinformation was top of mind. Everyone was worried we'd see replays of 2016, 2020, and that the platforms weren't going to be ready for it. Exactly. And the potential for more hacking and foreign interference in elections. It felt to me like, "There are so many different intersections with technology and with what we cover — we need to position ourselves now." I made a pitch to [Condé Nast] that I needed to build out a politics team. They were very receptive, very supportive. So by the end of 2023, we had that team in place. We started doing the coverage, and then midway through 2024, our focus changed when Trump was grazed in the ear by a bullet, Elon Musk endorsed him and it very quickly turned into a very different kind of story. One where we were able to bring a lot of expertise to bear around Elon Musk and the tech industry — how they think, how they operate. And with DOGE… I remember Zoe Schiffer, our director of business coverage — she wrote a book about what happened when Elon Musk bought Twitter. And she said: "This is going to be the Musk playbook — when he goes into a company, this is what he does. I think this is what we're about to see inside the federal government." So we positioned ourselves to cover it through that lens. Tesla stock is down and Elon Musk is much less visible than he was at the beginning of the year. DOGE doesn't seem to command the same kind of attention it used to. If people gave you money in February because they cared about DOGE, how do you keep them engaged in May and October? It's something that we think about and talk about all the time. The audience numbers on those stories now are not revolutionarily good — but they're still very good. And our mandate is to continue covering that as long as it is a consequential beat. We're going to stay on it. There will be more really big stories and really consequential stories to come out of what they are doing inside these agencies. But in terms of the community that we've built and all of those subscribers that we've added, now the challenge for us is to introduce them to the rest of Wired and what we have to offer. And to create new opportunities for them to really get to know Wired and get to know our journalists. So we're working on all sorts of things. We have been experimenting since late last year with livestream AMAs with Wired journalists, where subscribers can ask them questions. Thousands of people sign up and join those. This was the idea before the DOGE reporting really took off — to build Wired subscribers into more of a community and create less sort of a transactional back-and-forth. How is churn? I assume people who were signing up in February are more likely to stop subscribing than someone who's been with you for a while. Interestingly, our conversion rates are still way higher than they were last year and the year before. But our churn has gone way, way, way down. Among new subscribers, we're seeing churn rates that are vastly, vastly lower than what we were seeing in subscribers who signed up a year ago. Which is interesting. But again, it's only May. So we need to give that time. Sounds like you solved the whole thing. You solved publishing. I wake up every day assuming that I have not. Which I think is a pretty safe way to operate in 2025.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Instagram head Adam Mosseri on the 'paradigm shift' from posting in public to sharing in private
Why does Instagram want to show you stuff it thinks you'll like instead of letting you pick for yourself? And why is Instagram focused on getting people to share photos and videos privately? The two ideas are connected, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri explains: Normal people simply aren't sharing as much in public as they used to. Adam Mosseri's official title is head of Instagram, Meta's massive photo and video app. He also runs Threads, the Twitter clone the company launched two years ago. Unofficially, he's become one of Meta's chief explainers, frequently jumping on social media to defend and proselytize on behalf of his employer. So when I got a chance to interview Mosseri, I had a long list of questions about… lots of things: I wanted to know how Mosseri felt about the company's recent pivot to Trump-friendly policies, and how he looked at TikTok, and a million other things. I didn't have enough time to get to everything, but I got to a lot of it, and you can hear our whole conversation on my Channels podcast. In the edited excerpt below, Mosseri and I go over some big-picture stuff that tells you a lot about the current state of social media: Like why Instagram, Facebook and every other social media platform rely on algorithms to show you stuff they thinks you like, instead of relying on users to program their own experience. And why the company is gung-ho on getting users to privately send each other photos and videos, instead of its initial focus — getting them to post stuff on a public feed. And I also wanted to know about the backstory behind Threads — the text-based social network it launched just as Elon Musk was taking over Twitter. Mosseri was happy to talk about all of it. Peter Kafka: In the first few years of social media feeds, users would see a list of everything that everyone they were following had posted, in chronological order. Now, the standard at every app is a curated, algorithmic feed. Why does everyone who runs a social media product think that's better? Adam Mosseri: It's because it's the only way to grow these experiences. The amount of content people post publicly in feeds is going down across the entire industry, because people are moving more and more sharing to stories — which you could argue is a different kind of feed — but even more into messaging, group chats, one-on-one chats. On Instagram, there are way more photos and videos shared into DMs than into stories, and way more photos and videos are shared into stories than into the feed. So if the amount of content you have to rank is decreasing — how engaging the feed is is also just decreasing. It's just getting worse. We show recommendations because you might follow 200 accounts and one in 10 of them posted. So we've [only] got 20 things [to show you]. And we can reorder those 20 things 20 factorial ways, but that's only so much upside. Whereas if we look at the billion things posted in a given day and we find something you're interested in, there's more upside. Instagram has been encouraging messaging. It's something you've been talking about for a while. It's something users were doing on their own, and now you guys are responding to it? Oh yeah. It's a paradigm shift. The thing you hear is that people are going to chats because they feel like that's safer or they can have more candor. But are regular people literally thinking about how their posts are gonna be received? Is there some other reason people are sharing more privately versus publicly? The foundational reason is that there are more things that you would feel comfortable saying to somebody one-on-one than things you would feel comfortable sharing publicly. This is a weirdly sad example, but you could think of sharing in-feed as standing on top of your roof, yelling something at a hundred people, and hoping that 20 people hear it. There's some things I would do that for. But the average thing — the amount of things I would say to you on a phone call, my wife on a phone call, my best friend on a phone call — there's a lot more of those things. I think that's the most important reason. How does that shift affect the business of Meta? It moves more and more of that friend content into private experiences. And then the question is, can you either make those private sharing experiences symbiotic with the ones that we monetize — like feed and stories? Or can you monetize those experiences directly? For Instagram, the thing that has been amazing is that we have leaned into video in a way that actually grows messaging. When I worked on the Facebook app, we leaned a lot into video in 2014, 15, 16. We were very focused on trying to catch up with YouTube, and growing video grew the amount of time spent in the Facebook app — but it decreased everything else. It decreased messages, comments, likes, and revenue — because there's less ads per minute. [But] with Reels on Instagram, because they're short and because they're entertaining… I'll see a standup comic doing a bit that I love and I'll send it to my brother, because I know he's going to enjoy it. Or I'll see a piece on politics and I'll send it to you. Because I think you might be interested in it. And then you and I talk, maybe you look at your feed, maybe you engage with something else. Maybe you send that to somebody else. So there is a private messaging part of the experience, [but] we've managed to build it in a way that's very symbiotic with the public context — like feed and stories and reels, which we monetize directly with ads. We're going to show you engaging stuff, you're going engage in it, and we'll be able to monetize your eyeballs like we always have — and then you'll share it with other people. It's a positive feedback loop. And it's important particularly for Instagram because we are about connecting with your friends over creative things. I mean, for some people, we might be a pure entertainment-based or public content-based app. But we want friend content to continue to be a core part of the experience for most users. And this allows Instagram to stay social, but still grow as a business. I wanted to ask you about the Threads origin story. I didn't realize that it was originally supposed to be a feature within Instagram. We were talking about different ways to compete more directly with Twitter… Why? I know that back around 2010, the two services were fiercely competitive. And then basically that competition stopped, because you guys just lapped Twitter over and over and you won. There were many more people who wanted to engage in a Facebook and Instagram-like experience than they did on Twitter. So why bother going back to Twitter? I think Twitter's a great app in a lot of ways. I use Twitter a lot, still. I think it's better for public conversations. Even though it's not the biggest app, there's a lot of cultural relevance. There's a lot of really vibrant, amazing communities there — NBA Twitter, black Twitter there. There's these insular networks like VC Twitter and crypto Twitter. And part of what we care about at Instagram is being a place where creatives do their thing. And the initial thought was to bolt it onto Instagram? Around that time we really accelerated our work on broadcast channels on WhatsApp and on Instagram and on Messenger — which by the way, are a big deal in a lot of the rest of the world, particularly popularized by Telegram. We looked at and had a bunch of designs for building something like Threads as a tab into Instagram. And we did consider and ended up building a separate app, and there were a lot of contentious debates. What did want to do? Where did you want what's now called Threads to live? I was excited about channels. But Mark [Zuckerberg] made the point — and I agreed with him — that channels are not going to be a place where you keep up with tons and tons of culturally relevant people. They're going to be a place where you subscribe to the five or 10 you care about most. I was more bullish on building something within Instagram. Mark's point was that a separate app will be harder — but if it was successful, it would be a more valuable thing to create in the world. A lot of what Mark does is anchor us really high. And no matter how strong a year we have, the question is always — how can we do better? It was late. I was in Italy for my anniversary with my wife, and [Mark's] like, "Well, if you were gonna do something bigger, what would you do?" So I was riffing and I kind of pitched a version of Threads: We'll lean on Instagram's strength with creators. We'll use Instagram identity. You can bootstrap it with [Instragram's social] graph, but we'll focus on basic replies and threads. I called it Textagram as a joke. Which unfortunately stuck as a name for months before I managed to kill it. And Mark's like, "Yeah, that's a good idea. We should do that." And I was like, "I don't think we should do that." And in the classic Mark move, he said, "OK. But if you don't do it, I'll have somebody else do it, and it'll be built on Instagram." And I said, "OK. Sounds like I'm signed up." So he gets the credit. Read the original article on Business Insider
Business Insider
21-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Instagram head Adam Mosseri on the 'paradigm shift' from posting in public to sharing in private
Adam Mosseri's official title is head of Instagram, Meta's massive photo and video app. He also runs Threads, the Twitter clone the company launched two years ago. Unofficially, he's become one of Meta's chief explainers, frequently jumping on social media to defend and proselytize on behalf of his employer. So when I got a chance to interview Mosseri, I had a long list of questions about… lots of things: I wanted to know how Mosseri felt about the company's recent pivot to Trump-friendly policies, and how he looked at TikTok, and a million other things. I didn't have enough time to get to everything, but I got to a lot of it, and you can hear our whole conversation on my Channels podcast. In the edited excerpt below, Mosseri and I go over some big-picture stuff that tells you a lot about the current state of social media: Like why Instagram, Facebook and every other social media platform rely on algorithms to show you stuff they thinks you like, instead of relying on users to program their own experience. And why the company is gung-ho on getting users to privately send each other photos and videos, instead of its initial focus — getting them to post stuff on a public feed. And I also wanted to know about the backstory behind Threads — the text-based social network it launched just as Elon Musk was taking over Twitter. Mosseri was happy to talk about all of it. Peter Kafka: In the first few years of social media feeds, users would see a list of everything that everyone they were following had posted, in chronological order. Now, the standard at every app is a curated, algorithmic feed. Why does everyone who runs a social media product think that's better? Adam Mosseri: It's because it's the only way to grow these experiences. The amount of content people post publicly in feeds is going down across the entire industry, because people are moving more and more sharing to stories — which you could argue is a different kind of feed — but even more into messaging, group chats, one-on-one chats. On Instagram, there are way more photos and videos shared into DMs than into stories, and way more photos and videos are shared into stories than into the feed. So if the amount of content you have to rank is decreasing — how engaging the feed is is also just decreasing. It's just getting worse. We show recommendations because you might follow 200 accounts and one in 10 of them posted. So we've [only] got 20 things [to show you]. And we can reorder those 20 things 20 factorial ways, but that's only so much upside. Whereas if we look at the billion things posted in a given day and we find something you're interested in, there's more upside. Instagram has been encouraging messaging. It's something you've been talking about for a while. It's something users were doing on their own, and now you guys are responding to it? Oh yeah. It's a paradigm shift. The thing you hear is that people are going to chats because they feel like that's safer or they can have more candor. But are regular people literally thinking about how their posts are gonna be received? Is there some other reason people are sharing more privately versus publicly? The foundational reason is that there are more things that you would feel comfortable saying to somebody one-on-one than things you would feel comfortable sharing publicly. This is a weirdly sad example, but you could think of sharing in-feed as standing on top of your roof, yelling something at a hundred people, and hoping that 20 people hear it. There's some things I would do that for. But the average thing — the amount of things I would say to you on a phone call, my wife on a phone call, my best friend on a phone call — there's a lot more of those things. I think that's the most important reason. How does that shift affect the business of Meta? It moves more and more of that friend content into private experiences. And then the question is, can you either make those private sharing experiences symbiotic with the ones that we monetize — like feed and stories? Or can you monetize those experiences directly? For Instagram, the thing that has been amazing is that we have leaned into video in a way that actually grows messaging. When I worked on the Facebook app, we leaned a lot into video in 2014, 15, 16. We were very focused on trying to catch up with YouTube, and growing video grew the amount of time spent in the Facebook app — but it decreased everything else. It decreased messages, comments, likes, and revenue — because there's less ads per minute. [But] with Reels on Instagram, because they're short and because they're entertaining… I'll see a standup comic doing a bit that I love and I'll send it to my brother, because I know he's going to enjoy it. Or I'll see a piece on politics and I'll send it to you. Because I think you might be interested in it. And then you and I talk, maybe you look at your feed, maybe you engage with something else. Maybe you send that to somebody else. So there is a private messaging part of the experience, [but] we've managed to build it in a way that's very symbiotic with the public context — like feed and stories and reels, which we monetize directly with ads. We're going to show you engaging stuff, you're going engage in it, and we'll be able to monetize your eyeballs like we always have — and then you'll share it with other people. It's a positive feedback loop. And it's important particularly for Instagram because we are about connecting with your friends over creative things. I mean, for some people, we might be a pure entertainment-based or public content-based app. But we want friend content to continue to be a core part of the experience for most users. And this allows Instagram to stay social, but still grow as a business. I wanted to ask you about the Threads origin story. I didn't realize that it was originally supposed to be a feature within Instagram. We were talking about different ways to compete more directly with Twitter… Why? I know that back around 2010, the two services were fiercely competitive. And then basically that competition stopped, because you guys just lapped Twitter over and over and you won. There were many more people who wanted to engage in a Facebook and Instagram-like experience than they did on Twitter. So why bother going back to Twitter? I think Twitter's a great app in a lot of ways. I use Twitter a lot, still. I think it's better for public conversations. Even though it's not the biggest app, there's a lot of cultural relevance. There's a lot of really vibrant, amazing communities there — NBA Twitter, black Twitter there. There's these insular networks like VC Twitter and crypto Twitter. And part of what we care about at Instagram is being a place where creatives do their thing. And the initial thought was to bolt it onto Instagram? Around that time we really accelerated our work on broadcast channels on WhatsApp and on Instagram and on Messenger — which by the way, are a big deal in a lot of the rest of the world, particularly popularized by Telegram. We looked at and had a bunch of designs for building something like Threads as a tab into Instagram. And we did consider and ended up building a separate app, and there were a lot of contentious debates. What did you want to do? Where did you want what's now called Threads to live? I was excited about channels. But Mark [Zuckerberg] made the point — and I agreed with him — that channels are not going to be a place where you keep up with tons and tons of culturally relevant people. They're going to be a place where you subscribe to the five or 10 you care about most. I was more bullish on building something within Instagram. Mark's point was that a separate app will be harder — but if it was successful, it would be a more valuable thing to create in the world. A lot of what Mark does is anchor us really high. And no matter how strong a year we have, the question is always — how can we do better? It was late. I was in Italy for my anniversary with my wife, and [Mark's] like, "Well, if you were gonna do something bigger, what would you do?" So I was riffing and I kind of pitched a version of Threads: We'll lean on Instagram's strength with creators. We'll use Instagram identity. You can bootstrap it with [Instragram's social] graph, but we'll focus on basic replies and threads. I called it Textagram as a joke. Which unfortunately stuck as a name for months before I managed to kill it. And Mark's like, "Yeah, that's a good idea. We should do that." And I was like, "I don't think we should do that." And in the classic Mark move, he said, "OK. But if you don't do it, I'll have somebody else do it, and it'll be built on Instagram." And I said, "OK. Sounds like I'm signed up." So he gets the credit.
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Yahoo
Epic Games' CEO says fighting Apple cost his company more than $1 billion. He says it was worth it.
I started programming back on an Apple II when I was 13: You turn the computer on, you get a BASIC programming prompt. Anybody can write code, anybody can save it to a floppy disk, you can share it with a friend, you can sell it. Those digital freedoms are essential to the future. Tim Sweeney: This is really one of the issues at the heart of our digital freedoms for the future. We live our lives on our smartphones. We're connected constantly to people. We work on them. We play on them. And our futures are going to be ever more connected there. So the freedom for consumers and developers to do business together is of paramount importance. If you have one monopoly gatekeeper who dictates what people are allowed to play, see, hear — and takes exorbitant fees from every transaction that everybody does online — we're going to have a much less free world than the one that we grew up in. Peter Kafka: Why was last week's ruling important to you and Epic? And why should a normal person care about it? You can hear our entire discussion over on my Channels podcast. The following is an edited excerpt of our conversation. And I also wanted to know when I'll be able to play Fortnite on my iPhone — something I haven't been able to do since 2020, when Sweeney first started fighting with Apple. (I've asked Apple for comment, but they haven't expanded on the statement they made last week expressing their disappointment and plans to appeal.) Explaining why Apple's App Store rules are so important — to both Apple and the developers who complain about them — can be a drag, though I keep trying . I wanted to hear Sweeney's take on it directly because he's made the fight a core part of his job for half a decade. Apple is going to appeal that ruling (and Sweeney is in a parallel fight with Google over its app store rules). But if the ruling stays put, it means the five years and the enormous amount of money Sweeney says he spent and sacrificed by challenging Apple and its CEO, Tim Cook, will have paid off. Sweeney is the CEO of Epic Games — best known as the company behind Fortnite — and he won what may be a very meaningful court victory last week , by forcing a significant change in the way Apple runs its App Store. There aren't a lot of people who can say they've beaten Apple . Tim Sweeney may have just earned a spot in that club. Sweeney says he pursued the case for business reasons — but that there's also a moral component to his fight. Last week, Sweeney won what could be a far-reaching victory — if it survives Apple's appeal. It may also bring Fortnite back to iPhones. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney — the guy behind Fortnite — has been fighting Apple over its App Store rules for five years. Story Continues I subscribe to Netflix. I subscribe to Spotify. Neither of those is done through Apple because in both cases, neither of those companies wanted to pay Apple's fees. But I use Spotify and Netflix on my phone. I could maybe argue that it's a bit of a hassle for me to have to deal with Netflix on a website instead of directly through its iOS app. But it doesn't really seem like it's a sort of life and death situation for me or any of the companies involved. Apple has two tiers of rules. They have one tier of rules for what they call reader apps, which are basically apps operated by multi-hundred-billion-dollar companies — Amazon Video, Netflix, Spotify, and a number of others. Apple lets those apps do business outside of the app. And they've previously obstructed those developers from telling users about the better deals [you could get by going to those sites directly]. But even with that restriction, which is now being taken away, it seemed like life was OK for me, life was OK for Netflix, life was OK for Apple. Everyone was getting what they wanted. It was not OK for game developers. Because that reader app exception only applied to streaming video, streaming audio, and ebook sites. Apple forced all games, all social media apps, and everything else, to only do business through their app. So Apple imposed a rule on all game developers, saying if you sell anything for your game anywhere in the world on any platform, then you must sell it on iOS, and you must use our payment method, and you must pay us 30% if your revenue is greater than a million dollars. So the game developers did not have a choice, and everything there was just marked up 30%. What happens given the ruling last week? It means now all users are free to learn about better deals from all developers, and all developers are free to not just accept payments outside of the app on the web, but to tell users about those alternative ways to pay and to give consumers better deals. That's a key economic gain here. Now developers will be able to send users to the web to give them a better price, and then to make a little bit more money for themselves, too. But that's just the first-order effect. The second-order effect is that you can expect if Apple continues to offer such a horrible deal, that everybody's going to move away and steer their customers towards iOS payments on the web. So I would hope that Apple would step up and compete, give developers a much better deal than 30%, and actually engage in competition. But whether Apple chooses to compete or not, the court has enabled developers to make the choice for themselves. Apple says they're going to comply with the judge's ruling, but they're also going to appeal it. So it's possible the rules get changed again. Do you think a meaningful number of developers are willing to take advantage of this window, knowing that it can get shut down? It's 30% of revenue, so all major developers will support alternative payments. Spotify was the first major app I saw that already has done it. Fortnite will do it later this week. And many, many apps are doing it. You said Fortnite is going to come back to iOS. You guys were kicked off the platform in 2020 for violating Apple's rules. There's nothing in the judge's ruling that says Apple has to reinstate Fortnite on iOS. Have you talked to Apple? How do you imagine Fortnite will come back to iOS? Epic has a valid [Apple] developer account in good standing. Our subsidiary Epic Games Sweden opened up an account in order to distribute Fortnite in the European Union. Our dealings with Apple on that account have been managed by their developer relations team, who have been cordial. Do you feel confident that I will be able to play Fortnite on my iPhone later this week? I believe so. I would be very surprised — well, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if we had a bug that took a day or two more to fix — but I would be very surprised if Apple decided to brave the geopolitical storm of blocking a major app from iOS. We've told Apple what we're doing. How much has it cost you to engage in this five-year legal fight? We've had legal bills in the matter of Epic vs. Apple of over $100 million. I assumed it was much more. You were hiring top-shelf lawyers and … Well, yeah. Well over $100 million, just in legal fees. But if you look at lost revenue, that's another story. We can't predict exactly how much we would have made on iOS, but in the two years that we were on the platform, Fortnite had made about $300 million on iOS. So you could have projected hundreds of millions of dollars of lost revenue as a result of the fight. And that's just from people who were playing and couldn't play. I'm thinking of the future players you would have gotten, who didn't get exposed to the game because they don't have access to it via their phone. Roblox has tons of young players. The majority there are teenagers or below. They're all getting to it via their phone. Those are all people who could have played Fortnite for the last five years. That's right. Metcalfe's Law is a real factor here. You're much more likely to play a game or use a social network if your friends are there. So Apple cutting off Epic from access to the entire iOS audience, that not only affects the players that are directly denied access to Fortnite, it also affects all of their friends who might have played Fortnite more or might have played Fortnite but didn't, because their friends weren't able to play. So you could easily imagine that there's been a billion dollars or more of impact to Epic in this time. I think freedom cannot be purchased at too dear a price. The world needs to change here. And if it doesn't change, then you're just going to have Apple and Google extracting all of the profit from all apps forever. And there will be no proper digital economy. It will just be monopolization. I understand the logic and emotion behind that argument. On the other hand: You're running a for-profit company. You have a lot of investors. They put a lot of money into you. Did they come to you at any point in the last five years and say, "Tim, I know that freedom cannot be purchased at too dear a price. On the other hand, I've invested a lot of money in you because you're a games company, and your game is banned from mobile phones. Could you just settle this up and declare victory and move on?" Other than one investor who exited Epic right quick, everybody has stood by us, because nobody invested in Epic because they want to make a 30% profit flipping the stock. They have invested in [us], believe in our vision, believe in our potential, and believe that if we succeed in building the metaverse and growing Fortnite from a game into an ecosystem, into an open platform serving literally billions of players, that it will totally have been worth it. They all realize that if Apple controls the spigot, the revenue spigot at the top of the funnel, they will use that control to extract all of the profit that will ever be made from this space. Do you imagine this is the rest of your professional life — running a business, coding, and then also having legal fights with platforms? There's a game and a meta game here, right? The game is making awesome software, which is awesomely fun, creatively and technically. I love that. But there's a meta game of ensuring that we have the right to do that, and that we can profit from the fruits of our labor, and that all developers can. So much of our business is not just Epic profiting from our games. It's Epic helping other developers succeed and profiting from the success of thousands or hundreds of thousands of different developers themselves. Epic is one of the few companies in the industry that's positioned in a way that really forces us to fight for everybody. And I don't feel bad about this. I put a lot of brain power into coding over the years. I put a lot of brain power into figuring out how to defeat the monopolies that are blocking us. What good is coding if you don't have the right to release your product? You have to mix the love of the art together with your defense of your right to engage in the art. Read the original article on Business Insider
