Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…We spotted a product before it launched, bought the company, and launched it. It goes to number one the App Store. We didn't get the Android client out quickly enough. I think as a result, one of the things that happened was that when Instagram launched a short video, seemingly in reaction to Vine, I didn't think it was going to hurt us as badly as it did. One of the reasons I think it hurt us as badly as it did is, at the time, if you had Vine and you had an iPhone, the cool kids had Vine and the people had Android, phones were like, this sucks because I got an Android phone. Then, Instagram comes out with short form videos on both iOS and Android. You also have all the Android Instagram users going Vine sucks, Instagram is way better. That was certainly, certainly helpful to them and hurt us more than we thought it would. Just the ability to bring numbers to bear across that network on multiple products was just as bad as we thought it would be when they first bought Instagram. We knew it would be bad and then it was as bad as or worse than we thought it would be. Then, we were quick. You can go look at the historical charts. Usage just started dropping off and faster than I would ever would have suspected it. Man, that is the best encapsulation of the story of consumer technology over the last decade on the internet. You really can't outrun someone once they have a lead and they have either network effects going among a consumer-user base—look at Netflix. Enough users that are paying, they can amortize the costs of paying for content. It all keeps coming back to the same thing, which is once one of these services hits escape velocity and becomes dominant, it's so hard to ever compete with them on anything close to the same playing field. You just said the key point, though. The one place where I always felt—this led into the kind of stuff that we did in 2013 and 2014—that we had an advantage that we didn't leverage significantly enough was syndication. You can't view Facebook content anywhere but Facebook. You can view Twitter content, billions of tweets per day, all over the web, on espn.com, newyorktimes.com, and in blogs. It's everywhere. You don't have to go to Twitter to see it. It's literally everywhere. I always felt this was the idea behind Twitter moments. Look, if we can package up things that happen on Twitter into these kind of bundles as they happen, whether it's around predictable things like the Oscars, the Super Bowl, or the 200 of these things a year, whether it's around those or it's around this crazy thing just happened and here are the eight people who are there and their perspective, is on all these crazy other tweets about it. You can make bundles of those things that then get syndicated. All the other tweets get syndicated. You could start to think about long-term injecting ads into those bundles. That was a place where I felt Facebook can't compete there because they won't let their content be viewed on Facebook. The comment you just made, Ben, about uneven playing fields always felt like Twitter's advantage or opportunity for a beachhead in competition against Facebook was in syndication. Facebook wouldn't go there. We would have free reign to do that. After I left, that wasn't pursued as aggressively for whatever reason. I know Jack has said, look, the company was doing too many things and had to pair back what they were doing. That's worked out for them, obviously. That was my thinking behind that.…

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