[upbeat music] This week's episode of the Rebooting show is brought to you by Permutive. The rules of advertising are changing. Consumers are concerned about how their data is being used in advertising.
Regulators across the globe are closing in, and browsers are blocking third-party data. Publishers and advertisers need to develop responsible marketing practices that protect consumers' data.
Built on the core principles of privacy, consent, and transparency, Permutive's audience platform empowers publishers and advertisers to responsibly activate audiences without any third-party access to personal data, offering insights, modeling, and activation in cookie-restricted environments.
The data decisions that are made today will impact your ability to continue to effectively execute digital marketing in the future. Join Permutive in the responsible web. Find out more at permutive.com.
That's P-E-R-M-U-T-I-V-E. The reality of NFTs is it's just a technology, right? It's a technology that allows for the validation of online ownership. Okay, like, let me ask you this question.
I have a final question for you. New York or Miami.
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm Brian Morrissey.
I wanna thank everyone who has left a review for the Rebooting show on, uh, Apple Podcasts. It does help people find the podcast, or so I'm told.
Would love also your feedback for things you like, uh, with the show, things you don't like, um, really any feedback. My email is bmorrissey@gmail.com. Would love to hear from you.
Would love to hear the kind of topics that you wanna hear from. This week, I'm speaking with Keith Grossman. Keith is the president of Time. He's someone I've known for a long time.
I've done a couple of podcasts with him in the past. I actually just ran into Keith a couple months ago in Miami.
I was riding my bike down the beach, and wouldn't you know, I ride it past Keith Grossman on his phone doing deals. And naturally, he was here for Bitcoin week because Keith is a Web3 believer.
Now, we are in the midst of crypto winter. I ha-- I did call this one coming. I didn't know it would be this chilly, but winter has arrived, and there is a drumbeat of bad news.
Anyone who's seen the, the Gartner hype cycle knows that we are in, uh, the trough of disillusionment right now, and that's natural for any sort of new technology.
But I wanted to get, uh, to the bottom of what Keith sees and how it fits in with Time and how it plans to revitalize its brand under, uh, the ownership of Marc and Lynne Benioff.
Because I think what's interesting to me is there's a lot of legacy brands out there where it's pretty clear that the owners are milking the brand asset for all it's worth.
And this is a playbook, and it's a strategy, and I don't, like, fault people for that strategy.
What I think is interesting about Time is that, at least from the outside, from my perspective, is that there's a growth strategy here, and Web3 is an important part of that growth strategy.
So we get into why Keith is a believer in this and also just how to have a growth strategy at a legacy brand like Time that was formerly a magazine brand and is now a multi-platform brand, um, and is leaning heavily into events and franchises and the like.
So I hope you enjoy the conversation. Always, again, happy to, uh, hear your feedback. Here's, uh, Keith and I discussing Web3 and various other matters.
[upbeat music] So I just-- I like to start with what people saw and the white space they saw because you've been at, like, really good brands over the years, right?
Like, you're at Conde Nast with Wired and then at Bloomberg, and you had a brief interlude at Engine, but, like, you've been at these really great brands. What did you see in Time? Because I grew up reading Time, right?
It was the-- i-it was, like, how I sort of formed a view of the world each week with Time. But the Internet changed all of that. What did you see the opportunity there? Sure. First off, thank you for having me on.
The way that I look at organizations is essentially debate club meets investment advisor, right? And, uh, and I look at the debate, and the debate is always why X, right? So in this instance, why Time?
And then I look at the investments, and I look for certain things that I think really matter. What's the integrity of the brand, right? Like, how well known is it? You know, d-- is the readership real?
How established is it? And then I-- what I try to do is I look at the investment, and I try to determine the values of the investment and the fundamentals of the investments.
I look at a very key figure, which in my mind is, how is the brand valued today versus the perception of the value of the brand? How big do I believe the brand can grow to, right?
And what you look for is you look for a brand that has what is, like, a small perception today, but huge potential, not one that is larger than what its potential can be, right?
And that gives you the, I would say, the room or the growth to, uh, expand the brand. In the case of Time,
right, like, what I saw was a brand that was a hundred years old, that every time it was brought up, everyone always said, "Oh my God, I have a story," the same way that you just said it, right? Mm-hmm.
And I didn't-- honestly, when I came on board, I didn't realize how powerful that was, the amount of people that said, "I grew up with this brand. I learned English from this brand.
When I didn't trust the news in my country, I got information from this brand." The misperception of the brand was that it was solely a magazine, right?
It was Time magazine, and, you know, like, the question was, okay, so, like, what is the value of the magazine, and what is the value of the website? What is the value of social?
And now, you know, like, what is the value of us moving into Web3? So, like, I, I guess what I'm trying to get at is, like-Ah, yes, I have those memories.
I'm also, like, gonna be fifty this year, which is like it just hit me the other day, and it's, like, crazy.
Because, like, we see a lot of these legacy brands that I grew up with and stuff like this that enter into this phase. I don't know what to call it, but it's like almost like carcass media, like they're managing decline.
So give me the case for what you saw here that it wasn't just milking the brand equity, you know, putting like, you know, the Time Cafe in Manila and stuff like this.
And you know, you know what I'm talking about, this milking of the brand. Yeah.
And it's a strategy, but, like, it seems like with Mark Benioff owning Time, that there is a growth strategy here, which I think is unique for this kind of brand.
So so when you think about reinventing a brand or evolving a brand, you know, or growing a brand, like you have to either think what you said, which is defense or offense, right?
Like, and offense takes investment, and it takes risk. And we've been very fortunate that we have incredible owners with Mark and Lynn. And investment number one was the most obvious investment.
You know what, the last podcast you and I did together actually was rethinking Time after ten years of neglect, I think was the title of that, right? Yeah.
And that's exactly where we sort of came into was it was ten years of, you know, Time Inc. and Meredith essentially managing the brand down and not really going on the offense.
When Mark and Lynn came in as the owners, they've enabled us to go on the offense with investments, and they've given us what I would say is an irrational bubble to evolve the brand.
And, you know, the most obvious first place for us to evolve the brand is, is, you know, in digital and in events, which is I, I think straight out of the playbook of every media company, right?
Is like, how do you digitize, how do you sort of play on the event space?
But then I think where we started to really become unique was, um, you know, Ian Orefice, who's the CEO of Time and the, uh, president of Time Studios, uh, launched Time Studios, which really doubled us down in the video arena, and he was the one who structured the deal with Kanye West and ultimately got us to be the producers on, uh, the Genius documentary and then Inspiration4.
When COVID happened, because we had Time Studios, we were able to pivot our event business very quickly into, uh, Time one hundred Talks, right, because we had the investment and the infrastructure there.
And then the other area where I think we've gone on tremendous offense on is with, uh, Web3, right?
And, uh, Web3 is a, a absolutely fascinating area that came not because we planned it, but more because we just saw the opportunity to leapfrog into it and then grow from there.
And it's, in, in essence, up until this year, and Mark has made an investment in us, and our continued growth of Web3, uh, has been self-funded for the success it's had.
So I wanna get into the Web3 stuff, but let's just start where, where the state of the business is. What is-- how has the revenue profile changed at, at Time?
So from a revenue profile perspective, like we're seeing increased digital revenues, right? Like, events started to take off, and then when dot-- when twenty twenty happened, they went to zero.
But then what we saw sort of change in that is digital video revenues increased. And, uh, I think one of the fastest-growing revenue streams last year was Studios, right?
Was just an absolutely, uh, tremendous year for us. We had one of the best years in Time's history.
And, uh, and then Web3 comes about, and it's, you know, an incredible business that, you know, it builds from nothing and allows us to continue to scale out, I would say, horizontally to protect all of the revenue streams.
Print is exactly what you'd expect it to be, right? It's, print is you manage attrition. You know, the, the reality of print is that the B2B business in print is, uh, is declining faster than the consumer business.
But, uh, you know, in all of the other areas, because of the neglect, like, we're able to see growth based on just the fact that we're really pumping investment into it. Yeah.
And can you just talk a little bit about the role franchises play in that?
'Cause I think when you're probably looking at Time and the assets when you're considering, you know, making this move, you had to go to these franchises 'cause they're incredibly powerful. Mm-hmm.
The Person of the Year is massively valuable, and it was probably not fully realized under Meredith.
I mean, and I, I can just see the kinds of things that, that, that Time is doing now to really realize all the value that is in these kind of franchises.
Yeah, I mean, we have two franchises that I think really, um, hit the consumer zeitgeist and, and the global zeitgeist. One is, uh, Person of the Year, right?
And then the other is the Time one hundred, which is, you know, was just announced last week, and the event is next week.
I think in both of those, you know, they're very different, and, and that's one thing that I learned, you know, just in being here. Person of the Year is an acknowledgement. It's not an award, right?
But it's closer to a moment, right? Like, it happens, and, you know, from a business perspective, everything that we do with Person of the Year has to be, how do you build up to that moment?
But then the second the person's announced, after that announcement occurs, it goes to sort of like zero, right? So it, like, goes like this, and then it happens, and it just drops, and then the next year goes.
For us, like, the way that we looked at that was, like, does it just have to be Person of the Year? What other ways can we think about Person of the Year?
Uh, in one instance, you know, like, we've launched Entertainer of the Year and Businessperson of the Year, and those are the easy sort of answers, I think.
But, like, one of the other areas, and I think that I'm most proud of within the organization that I think was tremendously successful was between nineteen twenty-seven and nineteen ninety-nine, it actually wasn't Person of the Year, it was Man of the Year, right?
Charles Lindbergh, when in nineteen twenty-seven, was the first Man of the Year. In nineteen ninety-nine forward, it became Person of the Year.
Uh, in twenty--20, April of 2020, the editors went back through history, and they said, "If we were to go back 100 years and name a Woman of the Year for every year," and there were some years that women were named, right?
And those instances, the women were kept and that year wasn't touched. The editors went back and named a corresponding Woman of the Year, right, for each year.
And, uh, I think that, you know, while it culminated in this beautiful package in print and in digital, um, ironically, there was an event that was the last event that we were gonna do prior to COVID, and then COVID emerged, and we had to cancel that event.
But what people don't realize is that, like, Alma Har'el, the director, is creating a series for it that's gonna be on Amazon that's public.
And, uh, like, within the Web3 space, Nyla Hayes, who was our first, uh, TIMEpiece artist-in-residence, who's a 13-year-old phenom, uh, she depicted and drew an entire series called The Long Necki Women of the Year that was based on this franchise, right?
And so, like, this is a franchise that we built on top of a franchise that has allowed us to really think about every aspect of what we've built.
Yeah, 'cause I'm always interested in, like, the balance because, like, tremendous value, but, like, you can go too far, right? Like, y- you mentioned, like, Entertainer of the Year.
You, you could imagine, like, in a brainstorm, all of a sudden you've got, like, 1,000 different permutations of this.
And, like, I did something with Jessica, I don't know if we discussed it, but, like, you know, the 30 Under 30 at this point, like, I think, uh, uh, you know, half the people under 30 have been on one of these lists.
H- how do you balance, like, the impulse to scale these things? 'Cause we always have impulses to scale, right? I mean, it's about growth, right?
But at the same time, like, you don't wanna dilute, like, the value that you have in this franchise. I, you know, like, I don't think...
I think that the way that we think about it is we don't put too much out, and we constantly monitor, like, what the engagement is. Yeah. And, uh, when the...
You know, like, the problem is, is, you know, are you scaling for speed, are you scaling for sort of the long-term viability of the brand, right?
And I remember, and I said this in our first, uh, in our other podcast, our last podcast- Yeah...
not our first podcast together, but, like, in our last one that, you know, when I joined, I asked Mark and Lyn a very simple question, it's like, "What do you want? Why did you buy this brand?"
And, you know, they said they didn't like the state of media, and they wanted to make sure that the objectivity of the red border would survive another 100 years, right?
And so, like, for us, is running a good business important 100%, right? For us, is thinking about, you know, becoming profitable, which we're on the path towards, we're not just there yet, right?
But, like, is that important? 100%. But is it important that we do that this quarter or next quarter or tomorrow at the expense of the 100-year integrity of the brand? No. Right? Like, we would never violate that.
And so what we always have to balance is what's the smart move for our brand short term and long term, right? And, like, when people dilute- Mm-hmm...
very fast, it's because they're not thinking about 100 years out, right? They're thinking about, like, "What does it work for me now?"
And I think that breaking that cycle is easy to say when you're a private company, right? Yeah. And it's easy to say- It's harder, it's harder as a public. Right?
But, like, uh, but it's an important reality that, like... And by the way, like, it's an unapologetic, um, aspect of how we have to operate, right? Like, I think it's an advantage, to be honest.
And, you know, one of the themes that you might have noticed is, you know, like, between Conde Nast and WIRED and Ars Technica and Bloomberg and, uh, TIME, like, they all have the same commonality, right, is that I've gone to brands that have owners that allow us to evolve the brand thinking long term, because we don't- Yeah...
have to play for the short-term wins. That's savvy. You got advantages. You had a terminal in the background [laughs] at Bloomberg, and now the, the Benioffs, which help.
But you have to run both as profitable businesses. Like, the goal is not just to, like, stanch losses, correct? 100%.
I mean, look, w- like, at WIRED, we took WIRED from the 18th smallest brand to the fourth largest brand at Conde Nast. We made back every dollar it ever lost, and it was profitable when we left.
At Bloomberg, we cut the bottom line losses between 2014 and 2018, right, by 50% and grew top... double digits top line. And at TIME, we're growing. We're having some of the best years we've ever had.
Like, we have our issues, but we are moving in the right direction. Yeah. So let's get into the Web3 stuff, because, you know, you were very early into it, right?
First of all, how did you personally get into the crypto/Web3 space? Well, so, like, I'm kind of insulted by that question, Brian- Okay... because we've known each other n- for 10 years.
[laughs] And I know that, like, at my core, I'm just a dorky guy who likes, like, technology and business- Oh, oh... and art.
And, like, I, uh, that, like, what it was, I actually got into crypto- I'm just a dorky guy who likes business and technology and art. [laughs] Right. No, but here's...
The, the reality is I got into crypto in 2014 at WIRED, right? And I had no plans of entering crypto into TIME.
In 2020, I had, like, a bunch of realizations that all sort of came together in my head, which I could talk about in a second. But, like, I got an email from Mark in February of 2021 that said, "Did you see this?"
And the email was the Nyan Cat, uh, sale, uh, as an NFT for about $300,000. And I said, "Oh, my God," and I was like, "We could do this." And I've told this story many times. I'm like, "We could do this."
And then everyone was like, "What do you mean?" And I was like, "Let me ask you all, like, do you understand why a cat with the body of a Pop-Tart farting a rainbow, you know, just sold for $300,000?"
And everyone, like, looked at me like I was crazy. I was like, "You know, trust me on this one." We could do this. [laughs]Exactly how this plays out. I see exactly how this works.
Like, and I can see how our brand can fit into this space. And so I, I announced, you know, uh, in March, a month later, uh, and there was a, a Yahoo Finance article that Julia LaRoche did.
I said we were gonna enter into, uh, Web3. We were gonna do one of one NFTs.
We were gonna, within thirty days, accept cryptocurrencies for digital payments, which we took thirty-two of, and we, you know, now take thirty-three, and we did it within twenty-eight days. We now take ApeCoin.
Uh, and, uh, I said, uh, within six months, we'll figure out how to use the token and a blockchain to change the relationship our consumers have with our brand. And I didn't know how to do it at that time.
I just knew that the trend line was moving in that direction.
And when that article came out, like, I got texts from everyone in this industry that was essentially asking me the same question, which was like, "Are you nuts?" And I, I, I saw...
I, I just saw this trend line happening with, uh... What I saw was a few things. Like, twenty-twenty, I'm by myself, I'm isolated.
I'm upstate New York, and I realize I'm spending all my time online, and my digital identity has become just as valuable as my physical identity. And while that was true before, it, like, connected in my head.
That was a very real sort of aspect of how people were communicating. The second thing I saw was these, this technology of NFTs, right? And all I saw in it was not the art, right?
Like, all I saw was, I was like, "Oh, that's interesting. Here's a technology that validates the ownership of something online," right? That's it. And so then I had this moment where I was like, "Oh, that's interesting."
Like, if my digital identity is as valuable as my physical identity, and there's a technology that can validate ownership of an asset online, then owning something online is equal to or in the range of equal to owning something in real life if I value both the same.
And I just was playing with that forever.
And, uh, th- what I saw with the Nyan Cat sale was, uh, we have a cover store, and it's a very successful business of ours, and I was like, "Wow, well, like, if people love owning the physical replication, replicas of Time covers, I'm sure there's a group of people who love the digital replicas of Time covers," right?
After I did that, I mean, and we did very well. In the first, in the first week, we did... On the first night, we did four hundred and forty thousand dollars worth of sales.
On the first week, we did one point four million.
But, like, after that, when I sat in these rooms in Clubhouse and in Twitter Spaces, what I started to see was, oh my God, the smart contracts are changing the lives of artists because they're allowing them to monetize their impact on society versus their impact of creation.
I started to see collaboration. I started to see, like, wow, like, Web2's about audience, but Web3's really about community.
I started to see, you know, like, a different way in which brands could evolve occur, and that's what led us down this path. Mm-hmm. But when did it become...
'Cause I think when you first did, like, the cover thing, I think actually Justin Smith, you guys got into a little back and forth on Twitter 'cause, you know, he basically said, "Ah, this, these kind of gimmicks and stuff like this."
And honestly, I'm in Miami now temporarily, uh, it turns out, but, like, I'm much more optimistic. But I gotta admit, I was like, "Ugh, this is a gimmick. This is probably just another gimmick."
What is your response as far as, like, why this isn't just, like, a pandemic bubble, and you've seen all the videos about why Web3 is a scam. Why do you think that there's something here?
'Cause one of the things that I think about crypto and Web3 is it requires conviction to really be into it.
Because if you get hung up on all the, like, craziness and grifters and stuff, you, you can find it, like, very easily to dismiss it. Mm-hmm.
So, I mean, I didn't really respond to a lot of people on the questions of, "Are you crazy?" because throughout my career, you've seen it. Like, I've gotten this question, like, [laughs] over and over.
Like, with the tablet edition of Wired, we got, "Are you crazy?" With, with, like, crowdsourcing a tablet edition, "Are you crazy?" With, like, with Quick Take, "Are you crazy?" Um, with this, I, I saw a thesis, right?
You know, like, crypto has gone up and down quite a bit but has been around and survived quite a bit, uh, for nearly ten years. I, I see its impact on society.
I saw, uh, firsthand, like, one of the reasons I went into crypto personally was, uh, you know, it was prior to the election in twenty-twenty.
Uh, a- and I really just doubled down because everyone was screaming from the hilltops, uh, that there'd be no inflation as everyone was spending money on things like, uh, COVID relief, and I didn't see any fix in place.
And there's no way that I could see an endless spend of all governments with no fix in place that would not result in inflation. And so I just wanted asset diversification, right?
I think that if you look at this evolution in a, a six-month bubble or a three-month bubble or a, a window or a one-month window, like, you could say bubble as much as you want.
You could say, uh, fad as much as you want.
But I think that if you think about it not through the lens of, uh, the short term, but rather through the lens of the long term, what I see is people increasingly spend time online.
Uh, uh, people value their online identity. I mean, look, on Twitter, I have, what, fifty thousand followers. In real life, I have, like, three friends, right? Like, and so, like, I...
Like, people really value their life online. People want to politicize or, uh, create, like, all rationalities for what NFTs are. The reality of NFTs is it's just a technology, right?
It's a technology that allows for the validation of online ownership. And I think that what I saw in it was people were looking at the wrong things when they were making the judgment calls. They were looking at the JPEG.
They weren't looking at the technology. And, you know, like, here's a few real stats, right? With Timepieces, we've dropped, uh, twenty thousand Timepieces.
We have about fifty thousand people in the community total.12,000 wallets own time pieces and of the 12,000 wallets that own time pieces, 6,000 of those individuals have connected their digital wallets to time.com to remove the paywall, right?
And they do it in a way where they don't have to sacrifice their personal information. So like think about every media company that exists today, they're built on the need for cookies.
They're built on the need to know that it's exactly- Yeah... Brian Morrissey, right?
And like the reality is with GDPR emerging very strongly in Europe and CCPA emerging very strongly in the States, and with third party cookies disappearing over time, like the media industry's built on a tremendous fallacy of the information that it has about the consumer.
And at the same time that's occurring, like I think that consumers are sick and tired of being online renters to the platforms, right? Like they, at first, if you look at like Facebook, right?
At first, Facebook, when I was at Wired 10 years ago, was being celebrated for ushering in a new form of democracy. Today, if I was like- Yeah... do you trust Facebook, right? Like, people are like, "Oh, no."
Like, I mean, Facebook renamed themselves Meta because they were so untrustworthy, right?
And so like you start to look at that and you start to realize consumers are getting fed up with how platforms are taking advantage of them and this is also technology that not only allows for online ownership to take place, but it also allows for the transference of privacy from sort of the platform owning you to the individual owning your PII.
And I think that's a really big aspect that people don't talk about. Yeah. Now, like when you- Well, everyone needs the wallets for, for this to work, but I think that's like absolutely critical.
When I think about like the Web3 stuff, like I think ownership is incredibly important, like because it creates scarcity and then the second sort of thing is programmability. Like everything is becoming programmable.
Like to, to my mind, like, you know, coming out of the pandemic, you know, we got these amazing vaccines and like what's amazing is like y- you're- they're programming basically on a cellular level to some extent.
Mm-hmm. And so why wouldn't money be pro- programmable? It, it's a fascinating thing because picture this, right? The way that I try to explain it to people is there's a lot of friction in the system today, right?
Like, so it's very early, right? There's a lot of friction in the system. Like I always joke about like my mom calling me up and saying to me like, "Keith, get me on the Twitter," right?
[laughs] And I'm like, first thought, it's like, "Twitter?" But then second off, like, "Here you go," and I got to run in 30 seconds, right?
There's no scenario, zero scenario, not even like a.01% that she's ever gonna call me up and say, "Keith, get me a Coinbase, connect my wallet to the, my bank, transfer fiat..."
She's never gonna say the word fiat, ever, never, right? [laughs] "Transfer cash to Coinbase, convert it to Ethereum, let it sit for seven days. Get me a MetaMask wallet. What's a seed phrase?
Now connect to a MetaMask wallet. Now I can buy an NFT." No, that's never happening, ever. But like what will happen over time is the same thing that happened in the computing industry, right?
So in the computing industry, like think about it, you just said you're about to turn 50. I had no clue, actually, that you're 10 years younger, which is- Yeah. You look great for your age. Uh- Oh, thank you.
You should do this as video rather than for podcast. Think about this, right?
Remember when you got a 386 and then you got a 486 and it had eight megs of RAM and 16 megs of RAM, and then when you got a Pentium, like, ooh, Pentium, and like this was a whole entire big deal. Yeah.
That was the computing industry when specs led, right? And that changed tremendously the second Steve Jobs held up an iPod and said, "1,000 songs in your pocket," right?
And like right now we are in the spec leading, tech leading moment of this sort of evolution. Like nobody should be talking about an NFT in 10 years. That word should disappear.
What people should realize is that experiences will emerge, right?
And like ultimately where the NFT evolution or revolution takes place is, is any industry that lacks transparency will all of a sudden find itself completely disrupted because you have it, the ability to verify on chain publicly everything that's taking place.
And why is that important? Like, okay, forget art and collectibles, uh, for a second and think about like, uh, like title deeds in the housing industry, right? Think about- Oh, yeah... you know, medical records, right?
Think about, like it's very easy to see why art, right, and collectibles was disrupted 'cause this is the least transparent industry, lowest hanging fruit. Think about the ticketing industry, right, at events, right?
Like, like y- th- anyone who is a middleman in an industry, like this actually will make the industry far more efficient and effective, right, and more transparent.
And I think that is what I see and what I saw in this evolution. Now, along the way, will there be bubbles? 100%. Will there be busts? 100%. Will people make a lot of money? 100%. Will people lose a lot of money? 100%.
Like nobody should jump into this thinking that this is only gonna go straight up, right? Like what people should realize though is that it is an evolution in consumer behavior, right?
And when I say Web3, I actually mean four things. I mean crypto, I mean DeFi, I mean NFTs, and I mean the Metaverse.
And I can tell you straight up that the way that you, who grew up with an Atari and a Nintendo and a Sega, maybe not a Sega, but like all that stuff, right? I didn't have Sega.
You're able to understand, right, like you're able to understand, though, why Robinhood gamifies its app, right?
You can understand why everything today is gamified because like you have an entire generation that grew up- Yeah... with systems. Well, I mean, I will say this, to a degree.
I mean, I grew up like playing Asteroids on Atari, right? But I do think that there is a tremendous advantage to being immersed in, in gaming and gaming culture to really understand this stuff.
I think it's a tremendous advantage. [laughs] It, well, today it is, right? But like my eight-year-old daughter, Ellie, like she sits on Roblox all day and like that's a Metaverse, right?
And so she's gonna understand her reality in these experiences, and right now people see Metaverse as so-Rudimentary, but like ultimately, like it will transform the way education and schools you know, move. Yeah.
So let's break it down, though. Let's talk first about Timepieces, and then I wanna get into the metaverse stuff, because we lump all this stuff together, but it's, you know, they're different.
Oh, I- They're related, but they're different. But like, so the NFT covers, I get it. Totally. Like one person- Yeah. Yeah... owns, like I get it. It's a flag. I get it.
Explain, though, m- moving on, you know, w- with what you did with Timepieces. 'Cause it's a bigger- Sure... uh, bet, I think.
Well, so Timepieces is a much bigger bet, and, and it's much s- it's scalable, and it changes the relationship that a brand can have with its community, right? And so, you know, sh- i- the covers, we've sold 11 of them.
The last two went for, you know, 99 ETH apiece, so about $400,000 apiece, right? And like, there's very few people on the planet that, that can afford that.
And, you know, with Timepieces, we really were thinking more along the lines of, like, how do we scale this out and make it more accessible to a larger community?
And, uh, while the average price point of the Timepieces is in the high hundreds, low thousands, right, like when we mint 'em, like the last minting that we did, uh, was.2 ETH, you know, and the one before that, and that was a very small sort of collection with Timberland as an artist in residence.
And then the one before that was a very large collection at.05 ETH, which was about $85, $90 at the time. And that one sold about 10,000 pieces, right? And, you know, like our view of it was, how can you take the token
and verification and build a community around that? I understand Web3 skeptics. I try to like be in the middle f- of all these things, but like I get it. I, I do.
Because, like, people are like, "Why are you buying a JPEG?" and stuff like this. But when y- like y- when you add, like, actual utility to it, you're not just buying a JPEG.
So I would say to all the skeptics out there, you're fine to be skeptical, fine, right? Like, but just ask why you're skeptical.
Are you, like, skeptical because you wanna oppose change, or are you skeptical because there's something that, like, ultimately has an issue with your inherent value system, or are you skeptical 'cause you just wanna be skeptical, right?
But the ownership of one of the tokens, before you even create utility, creates a new community.
It reforms a community, and that new formed community, you know, rallies around shared psychographics as opposed to traditionally in the real world, you know, physically in the real world, which are usually shared demographics or geographics.
And I think that's really important that, like, the ownership in and of itself creates a community that emerges on shared psychographics. Now, those psychographics can fall into two camps, in my opinion.
Um, they could fall into values-based communities or greed-based communities, right?
And it's very easy for the largest group of people to focus on the greed-based communities, because that's where the excessive wealth and loss takes place, right?
Um, but on the values-based communities, like what attracts people every day in and day out is that a group of people are coming together around something bigger than, "What's the return on my ownership of this one asset today?"
And they believe the idea that, like, values will create value over time. And so, you know, for us at Time, we've been very clear that we launched these tokens, that we're building for a very long period of time.
We don't look at things like floor price. We don't think about, uh, the greed-based community needs of returning immediately, but what we do believe is we could return in a different type of value, right?
The first value is we'll give you a home or a space where you can establish friendships that are based on the values that we're putting forth, and the values of Timepieces are, uh, inclusivity, optimism, you know, constructive feedback, which is really not...
Like, do you tell us when we do something wrong or where we can do something better. Just don't be an asshole, right? And- This doesn't sound like Twitter at all, Keith. I know, right?
Well, this is why we do this on Discord, right? [laughs] This is why we do this on Discord, right? But like Ti- Web3 really exists in only two places, which are Twitter and Discord, right? But like it's... And, and that.
And then what we do is, is we have seven moderators every day that like, that we rally around, and, you know, while it's amazing, like we've seen the Discord space for Timepieces is almost at 21,000 as of this morning.
We've seen it grow organically, but we've also booted about 7,000 people from our Discord that don't align with our values. Now, Web3 exists over here, and I'll talk about that in one second, and Web2 exists over here.
Our success, in my opinion, as a legacy brand that's evolving into Web3, is how do you create a real Web 2.5 experience for the consumer?
And what that means is, is how do I take owning a token over here and giving you access to the things we have over here in Web2? So connect your wallet to time.com. It removes it.
Without giving any PII, you have access to the site.
We said something to the extent of, if you want to, uh, attend Time Person of the Year event with Elon Musk, you could enter a contest over here, and we will select five winners that would be able to attend sort of the contest that's coming out of here.
Mm. We take speakers and access that we have in Web2, right, through the established brand, and we bring them into the Discord often. So like, as people get stressed in the space, we bring in Deepak Chopra quite a bit.
We've done talks with Madonna. We've done talks with people. We've done talks with, uh, uh, Emilia Clarke from Game of Thrones. We've done talks with Ben Mezrich and others, right?
And we do talks, and we bring sort of the access that Time has into Web3, but the only way that you can access those chats and those conversations are if you own a Timepiece, right? Yeah.
And so you essentially create a community that is a funnel, and that funnel is like you have access to the whole communityIf you want, without ever having to make any purchase or investment.
But if you want to sort of move up into certain areas, right, like that's where ownership has its benefits. Yeah.
So are you like onboarding people that are new to quote unquote Web3, or are you finding the people that already exist within the Time community universe that are already into Web3?
'Cause I think that's like the ultimate question is who's going to onboard the people? 'Cause the true believers are true believers.
We'll see some of them will fall away in this crypto winter, the speculators and stuff like this. But- Mm-hmm.
The question is like, who is gonna be able to, and there's gonna be a bunch of different, uh, entities that do this, but be able to move more people who, who are comfortable with Web2 into Web3 and, and, you know, Web 2.5, I guess would be the in between.
So I'm operating under a very simple thesis that every day that goes by more friction is removed from the ecosystem, right?
And you know, like I give the example of my mom and you know, like the reality is like watch what Visa and MasterCard are doing. Watch what MoonPay is doing, right?
Where they're creating semi custodial wallets or they're, you know, removing the needs for crypto to enter into the conversations, and they're making it easier for more people to onboard in.
We at Time have deliberately kept Timepieces separate from Time, right? Timepieces has thirty thousand followers on its Twitter handle, but they're all organic Web3 followers.
And you know, Time's Twitter handle has eighteen and a half million followers on it. If we promoted Web3 to the eighteen and a half million followers, it would create more confusion today than success, right?
And so we're building them simultaneously, but like the reality is there will be a Rubicon one day that we cross when like enough friction has entered-- has left the system that you can bring the two together, but it's not there yet, right?
And so what we're doing for the eighteen and a half million is, you know, slowly but surely we educate them, I think very responsibly. Here's what I mean by responsibly.
Like Andrew Chow, who's an amazing writer at Time, has a newsletter called Into the Metaverse, right? Some of our partnerships have actually created assets that explain what the Metaverse is to people.
That's partnerships with Galaxy or like partnerships with Grayscale that has explained what Bitcoin is or Ethereum is or what altcoins are and how to think about the space.
We have a personal finance site called NextAdvisor, which is a JV with Red Ventures that does crypto education, right?
And that crypto education actually accounts for close to forty to forty-five percent of the traffic to the site, right? And we take our role as Time very seriously to educate but not preach, right?
Like what's happening in the space as it relates to the world, right? Time ultimately captures impact, and so like what we're capturing is the impact that it's having on the world.
We're not giving how-to tu-tutorials except for in this JV, uh, with NextAdvisor. But that's how we're looking at it. We're playing essentially two games.
One is to the core people, and every day we believe more people enter into the space slowly, and then the other is to the mass audience where we're just educating, giving context to.
So what have the like-- what are, what has the business impact been?
Like I would imagine like one like sort of second order impact, at least in, in the near term, would be it would help you break into a growing category with like, uh, all the crypto companies that have massive marketing budgets and very small marketing teams, and they have to deploy a lot of money at once.
That's why they s- put their names on arenas and stuff like this. Has that helped? Has that been like one of the biggest near-term benefits? 'Cause some of the numbers, they're fairly small.
Like I would guess this is not like a major revenue source yet. So I mean, it-- we've done... So let, let me step back. NFTs have a different
sort of, uh, benefit that like very few people talk about where, you know, like we were building it from zero, and, uh, because of the ability to have a smart contract affixed to an NFT, we could change the relationship that we had with the creators in the NFT space, right?
And so the first one percent of the primary sales, which is the sales that happen when we sell them the first time to the market, right, the mint, uh, the first one percent goes to charity.
And to date since September, you know, we have raised nearly six hundred thousand dollars for charity that had mainly gone to either supporting free democratic presses throughout the world or humanitarian relief in Ukraine.
We did one drop that was a hundred percent of the proceeds on everything went there. The first one percent of the secondary sales that take place, right?
So when somebody buys the piece and then decides they wanna sell it or flip it, goes to charity too. The remaining ninety-nine percent of the revenue is split evenly with the artist or the creator, right?
So this is fascinating when you think about this, not only for the primary sale, but for the secondary sale in perpetuity.
So what started with thirty-eight artists in September is now eighty-nine artists, including Timbaland, right, the Grammy Award-winning producer, who every three months get an Eth transfer from us, from our finance team, for the rest of their lives based on the secondary sales that, um, take place with Timepieces.
And so think about this, for the first time you have in, in a business and media aligned incentives, right? Like essentially the creators are just as much a part of our family as, uh, the employees are.
And, uh, like I make sure that as we think about the creators, right, and the artists, like we're constantly supporting them, like they are core to everything that we do.
We're promoting them, we're pushing their agenda, we're making sure that their work is being seen. We're elevating them wherever we can to our power. And you know, what we see is, is they support us as well.
Now I, I, I point all that out because right off the bat-We've given away, uh, essentially, ah, fifty percent of the revenue that we bring in, right?
And in one year, uh, Timepieces in the one of one NFTs, ah, combined did ten million dollars in profit. Okay? In profit. Okay, so it's contributing to the business. It's, yes. This is not like a cost center.
It's a- No... profitable part of the business. Ten million dollars in profit in one year.
And so, you know, and that came out, by the way, uh, the Press Gazette realized it 'cause they did the math, and then Digiday wrote, wrote a piece about it. But it, it's a very good business to be in.
And not only is it a good business for us, but it's a good business for our creators, right, who make a lot of money off of it as well. Okay, so final thing, uh, is Metaverse, 'cause this is a different, like, ballgame.
We're gonna have to do, do it pretty quickly. But are you, are you bullish on the Metaverse? [laughs] I mean, there are so many people who are hellbent on this thing happening that, like, I'm just like, "Okay."
I get to a certain age. I'm almost 50. I'm like, "Okay, if you're insisting on it happening, it's gonna happen." I'm divided, right?
Like, I think that right now, like, what people do with new technologies is they tend to adopt what they know in, like, the previous technology to the new technology.
And, uh, and, like, in the beginning, it tends to be very gimmicky and BS-y. And on the other end, the people who are very successful tend to go to the extreme in the beginning, right?
And I think that's what we're seeing right now. Um, I can't wrap my head around, um, like, "Hey, Brian, uh, you're in Miami. I'm in New York. Let's hang out," you know, with headsets on. Like, that just doesn't...
Like, for me, that's not gonna fly. I can wrap my head around the idea of, uh, we have a presentation or a meeting. Like, how does that come together in a completely different experience?
I can wrap my head around education, right? I can wrap my head around a combined metaverse and in real life experience, right?
So, like, how do you have doctors in one room doing something with, you know, uh, in the metaverse that can create an outcome in another room in real life? Yeah. I am bullish on...
I am very bullish on education, to be honest, because I saw it when we did the Fortnite experience where we rebuilt the Martin Luther King "I Have a Dream" experience, and we put it in Fortnite, like the one metaverse that nobody would expect an educational experience to take place.
And I think close to 14 million people showed up and spent 49 minutes in it, and, like, the numbers were through the roof.
And, look, we will have some metaverse experiences, but those metaverse experiences will tie into, uh, what tokens do you have, what NFTs do you have to give you access to this, and how can they tie in brand in a larger way that adds value?
What they won't be, and I can tell you right now, is they won't be a Time magazine in the metaverse. It won't be a Time store in the metaverse, right? Okay.
You're not- Like, it won't- Okay, so you're not gonna throw up a Decentraland, 'cause I guess I see a lot of the metaverse stuff, and I, I can tell the box check, checking, like, you know, particularly from ad- So-...
agencies. They're like, "Okay, we'll do a Decentraland." Must just be, like, cashing checks from, like, Anheuser-Busch and stuff like this for these.
So, you know what, Tony, is, is like, like, we will be in some metaverses, but we won't... You won't see us do the traditional thing, right? Like, we will not...
The same way that we were zagging with Web3 while others were zigging, like, we'll do the same thing with the metaverse experiences. Yeah.
But it's, uh, Alex Kantrowitz who, who I highly recommend his Big Technology newsletter and podcast. I agree. He, he wrote a, a really smart piece about, like, that it, it sure sounds like an enterprise play right now.
And, like, I do think there's gonna be a lot of consumer applications of, uh, the metaverse, metaverses.
Um, you know, you can just see that it makes a ton of sense in training and in that, in those fields, like you said, like education. Yeah. Lots. I mean, I, I just... I could see it with my daughter, right?
And I could see that's where the evolution takes place. But, like, I just... You know, like, everyone who goes so extreme on anything, right? Nothing is so extreme, right? Like- Yeah...
you, we're not gonna give up our entire lives to live in The Matrix. I could see where it complements life, right?
What I'm more bullish on, and this is just a completely different sort of topic entirely, is, is, like, I have behind me, you know, an Oculus, right? And, like, it's fun. Like, uh, like, I like it from time to time.
It's been amazing for meditation. I would highly recommend it, right? Uh, but I like sort of the application of AR way more than- Yeah... I like the application of VR, right? Because everyone has this device, right?
And it's very easy, uh, to see how you could put, like, an information overlay on everything when you have a camera in your pocket, right?
And so, like, I see the lens, I see the world through the lens of trends and friction, right? And I could see how that takes off way faster. But I'm not discounting the metaverse.
I just, you know, like, uh, like, I think it's gonna be important for us to play in it, but we're not gonna play in it, like, by having a, a, a Time newsstand, if that makes sense. Yeah.
So last question is, I know it's only June, but- We're done. We're done... is, is it gonna be [laughs] is it gonna be, is it gonna be Zelenskyy or Putin for the, the Person of the Year? Can I tell you, like- [laughs]...
this is what I do every year. Every year that it's time, Edward knows this, I don't wanna be part of this selection at all, and I don't know who the Person of the Year is until it's announced on TV.
And what I like about that, uh, if it's someone that everyone likes, everyone gives me credit anyway.
And if it's someone that nobody likes, everyone, I can just say, "I don't know, and I'm not part of this whole entire selection." Yeah. Right? And but to be honest, like, the editors choose. They don't choose- I know...
until the end. Like, let me ask you this question. I have a final question for you. [gentle music] New York or Miami? Both. That is the answer. I don't understand.
Just like you're saying, everyone always goes to extremes, and I see, like, New Yorkers love to hate on Miami. And to such a degree, I'm like, "Have you ever been here?" Like, literally, have you ever been here?
Because it's, like, pretty awesome. And then, you know, uh, by the same token, like, there's a lot about New York that, like, drives me nuts, but New York is unique.
It's where I lived for 20 years, and I will be living for another 20, i- ideally more, years very soon. So I think the answer is always both. They both have good things. Hold on one second. Hold on.
So c- can I just say on that note, thank you for proving my point. Exactly. [laughs] All right, Keith. We're gonna leave it there. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you doing this. Always a pleasure, my friend.
Thank you for listening this week. We will be back next week with a new episode. The Rebooting show is produced by Podhelpus. Podcasts are a great way to expand your client base.
Podhelpus lets you focus on having engaging conversations, giving your brand the full stack of services needed for a professional look and sound. Start your podcast today at podhelp.us.
[outro music]