leadership
Face-Off: TED Talks vs. FORA.tv
Miss TED or some other egghead confab? Watch it online! Inside the battle to build a Web-video destination for smart grown-ups.
| TED.COM | FORA.TV | |
| WHAT CAN YOU WATCH? | A total of more than 596 talks available, all from TED's two annual conferences, TED (February, in California) and TEDGlobal (July, in Oxford, England). | More than 10,000 talks available, in whole or in part, from 160 presenters at venues such as the Cambridge Union Society and the New York Public Library. |
| WHO'S WATCHING | About 11 million streams served per month; 60% of viewers are overseas. | More than 2 million streams served per month; 41% of viewers are overseas. |
| SLOGAN (WHAT IT REALLY MEANS) | "Ideas worth spreading" ("Isn't technology great? We can use it to save the world.") | "The world is thinking" ("Isn't technology great? We can use it to watch these videos.") |
| PARADIGMATIC VIWER | Penn Jillette: intelligent, tech savvy, sometimes funny, a bit of a blowhard | Tom Friedman, or the hippest humanities professor at Williams College |
| FOLLOW THE MONEY | Not-for-profit; revenue via Web-site ad placements, conference fees, and sponsorships. Corporate partners include BMW, GE, and IBM. | For-profit; revenue from on-site sponsorships (e.g., Chevron) and ad splits with distribution partners such as Hulu. Expects to break even this year. |
| MOST POPULAR VIDEOS | Oceanographer David Gallo on "underwater astonishments"; Pattie Maes of the MIT Media Lab demo-ing an alternate interface to the human environment | MythBusters's Adam Savage on "colossal failures"; astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on "America's irrational love affair with Pluto" |
| VIEWEING EXPERIENCE | Crisp white, with accents of steel gray and red. Think lunch at the Googleplex. | Somber charcoal gray and black. Think Master's Tea at Yale. |
| RATION OF VIDEOS I FINISHED TO ONES I BEGAN | 3/5 | 2/5 |