December 16th, 2008
Current TV CEO Joel Hyatt and Twitter CEO Evan Williams Discuss How Media is Evolving at Web 2.0 Summit
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Here’s a video of Current TV CEO Joel Hyatt and Twitter CEO Evan Williams discussing how media is evolving with Ken Auletta from The New Yorker at the Web 2.0 Summit –
Here are some of the key sound bytes from the panel –
- Twitter hasn’t yet focused on monetizing its service, but there is both commercial and personal value in Twitter and, at the right time, it won’t be hard to monetize Twitter.
- Brands like Woot and Dell are creating commercial channels to reach out to their consumers and users are opting in to these channels. All the commercial activity on Twitter is opt in, charging brands for enterprise channels will be more valuable that charging brands for advertising.
- Many major news organizations are now referring to Twitter as a source in their news reports and journalists are using Twitter to find stories and sources.
- Twitter and Current TV tied up to bring interactive coverage of the 2008 US presidential debates at election.twitter.com. Then, they tied up with Digg to cover the 2008 US elections in a way that involved the audience in a way never seen before.
- Current TV was the first player to marry the power of television with the interactivity of user generated content, even before video sharing websites like YouTube became popular.
- Almost 40% of the stories on Current TV are user generated and such citizen journalism has broadened the scope of the type of stories that are being covered. Not only that, user generated ads are more popular on Current TV than ads created by ad agencies.
