Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…You make trades on the platform. You communicate with other traders on the platform. You can run all sorts of data and analytics on stocks, on companies, on markets. It’s very, very cool. And Alex was alluding to, it’s also quite expensive. When you’re selling to clients that have a lot of money, they’re willing to pay a lot. It’s interesting, you know, and we’ll get into the show here, but in recent years Bloomberg has evolved and started doing radio which is now podcasts like Alex’s Deal of the Week; and television and TV channels, news. There are about 2000+ editors and reporters at Bloomberg that Alex is part of that organization. But the terminals, subscribers to the terminals, as Alex was alluding to, pay about $25,000 a year per terminal. And they are in the neighborhood of half a million people that do that which makes Bloomberg quite a large company. Yeah, it’s really interesting to think about there’s all these, you know, we’ve talked about the changing dynamics in the media industry at a lot of these different episodes. It’s primarily because the way that most publications work is just selling ads and that’s their main revenue model. There’s subscription, there’s paywalls, there’s all these other things. But, you know, with Bloomberg they produce all this media but the core business is one with network effects, one that’s based on technology, one that’s essential for people to do their job and it's not monetizing the ads on the publications. There’s a little bit of that too because, you know, it’s a decent business but certainly not compared to selling terminals. So with that, Alex, with that long preamble, what’s your perspective on all that being at Bloomberg, at this company, but also being a journalist and a reporter and a M&A reporter, how does that play out for you?…

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