In the previous blog I explained the history of the TED Meeting (actually the official name is the TED Conference) and how it has become a new genre of dialogue that has both grown and been copied around the world.
Richard Saul Wurman sold the TED Meeting to Chris Anderson, a British entrepreneur and publisher in 2001. Anderson bought it through his Sapling Foundation so that it became a not-for-profit. Despite the high cost of admission, which was $6000 per person in 2007, demand for the event and related activities, including international meetings, continued to grow dramatically, and the prestige of having given a “TED Talk” grew with it (great for your resume). Anderson was a creative marketer and came up with TED Prizes, TED Fellows and other initiatives which strengthened the TED community.
He continued to video the presentations as Wurman had done before, but decided to experiment with the idea of putting some of them online for free. The response was so phenomenal that he decided to turn his concept upside down. Since his vision had always been “Ideas Worth Spreading” he built a website around the talks. The conference was the engine to generate the great content, but the website was the amplifier to take these ideas to the world. In July 2012, a total of 1300 TED talks had been posted, with 5 to 7 additional talks posted every week. In June, 2011, the number of views passed 500 million. By November, 2012 it had exceeded one billion! If you’ve watched a TED video you have to appreciate the production quality of each talk. Multiple cameras, excellent audio and professional operators assure first class output.
Obviously not every talk is fabulous. So, not every talk is posted. But the real reason there are so many good talks is that Anderson introduced a new concept in 2009 called “TEDx”.
As the TED website explains, Continue reading