YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Altchek

lines on the record: 31
first: 2016-01-14
most recent: 2016-01-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, no, no. We're focused, and I think by the end of the year the goal is to reach all 40 million of those college educated young people in the U.S.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's always a conversation of build versus buy. Once you have growth and revenue engine going, it's actually an attractive proposition to look at other players. The question is always merging content companies is really hard. So are you better off buying things that you don't have currently in whether that's technology, video capabilities or other pieces like that? And so for Mike, we've been thinking about it more in that space.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Because there are 40 million college educated millennials in the U.S., 80 million millennials half went to college, 40 million college educated millennials in the US. We reach somewhere between one out of two and two out of three every month. And that's the group that has all of the income and all of the wealth in this generation. And so it's a pretty simple pitched advertisers, especially advertisers who are selling expensive products, to say we understand this demographic better than anybody else. We understand how they think. We understand how they talk. We understand what they want. And we have a simple and easy and clean way for you to work with us. And then the results speak for themselves. And if you want to come back, you can come back.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They want to cut deals with two or three big sites or big networks. And so the question is do you meet the threshold of who advertisers are going to work with? I think this past year, we proved that we do.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think the next year is going to be a really fun one for those that are big enough to play ball. The macro trend is still, I think it was 2014 number, 69 billion in TV advertising in the US alone and 4 billion in digital video advertising. Those dollars are still shifting, whether they shift at 5% a year, 10% a year, 20% a year doesn't really matter. We're talking about billions of dollars moving into the ecosystem. And these are the billions of dollars that are actually brand advertising dollars. These are not the direct response dollars which moved five years ago to Google. And Facebook and Facebook. These are the dollars and Facebook installs. These are the dollars that are actually at play for premium publishers. So that's happening, but that's happening only to people who can really handle volume because advertisers don't want to cut deals with 100 different sites.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's probably been the luckiest thing since I've started Mike is just I've been able to find advisors that know what they're doing and tell me when I'm wrong. So a couple of people that have been super influential, Dave Finocchio, who started Bleach Report. He's one of the least discussed and smartest content people, I think of our time. I mean, Bleach Report is a massive force.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what are you using to sort of guide you as you sort of figure out how to tackle this stuff? These aren't things that you learn how to manage 100 plus people on your own. You don't learn how to do video on your own. Who do you go to for advice? Who's sort of guiding you through this stuff?”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meanings Apple TV Heroku, it's going to be a, it's not going to be sort of like, hey, type in Mike.com, but we believe we've tested it with a bunch of users and we believe there's a real role for Mike to be a strong brain in people's lives that people come to. And we believe we have the product capabilities to make that happen. And so I think a lot of publishers have for a long time technology companies said, hey, you guys focus on the content. We'll build the tech. It'll be great. And a lot of publishers said, oh, yeah, yeah, we're still going to build our own tech. And then in the last year with all these new mobile products like instant articles and moments and snapchat Discover, I think some publishers have finally said thrown in the towel and said, okay, you guys do the tech, we'll do the content from here on out. And we don't think that that's the right strategy. We think there's a pendulum and it swings back and forth. And right now we're in the sort of platform distributed side. I think two years from now or maybe a year from now we'll be back.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For us, it's both actually. So we definitely built actually a metric for distributed content. We don't think all views are equal, and we've been playing around with the metric internally that really allows us to compare apples to apples across platforms. But one of the things I think where we're different than a lot of publishers is we actually believe we can build Mike as a brand into a destination. And so this year, while a lot of publishers are de-emphasizing product, at least their own product, we're going to be launching a set of products that push users to come back to us.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We think it's going to continue to change for the foreseeable future, and that's why it matters to be across a bunch of different platforms. And now actually in a bunch of different geographies as well. And so on the platform side, we're across obviously Facebook and Search and Tumblr and Twitter and Snapchat and all these different places. So I change, call it a plus minus change of 50% in one platform doesn't destroy you. I think that's how you have to think about building one of these businesses today. And you should expect meaningful changes in distribution. I think for the next few years, because none of these platforms have settled.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we've seen, we've actually seen a couple things. We've seen the number of viral tech story outliers go away. We've seen the number of video viral outliers increase. So the types of content that's reaching a ton of people is just shifting. What it's meant for our, call it referral traffic is much more stable referral traffic that for us is actually still growing, but growing in a different way than it was growing a year ago.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the obvious one, and it's not three months ago, but the obvious one that works today that didn't work a year ago is video, you know, video distribution on Facebook was not existent a year ago or a year and a half ago now. What worked six months ago, so call it June, that doesn't work today, the number of million plus view stories through Facebook has essentially gone away. So there are very few viral outliers in tech stories now versus eight months ago.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's not one secret. There's a bunch of strategies, and they actually change every three months. I mean, that's one of the things I think people don't really realize is how quickly the landscape of distribution evolves. Every three months there's something new happening, and whatever worked three months ago doesn't work today. And that doesn't mean you need to change your content and change the quality of what you're doing, but you definitely need to be thoughtful and strategic about how you're going to be distributing the content.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I mean, for us, it was test and learn, and it was really Jake, my co-founder, who intuitively understands why some stories resonate in a way that you'd send them to your friends and why some stories don't. It's actually, it's not new in a lot of ways. I mean, if you talk to old TV producers or magazine authors or editors, they understand shareability just as well as anybody else. What's going to start a conversation? What's going to turn heads? you know, for some reason or other, some people get it more intuitively than others. Jake is the one who really figured it out. We built a big analytics team to confirm what his theories were that were right and what his theories were that were wrong and then turned that into a big machine that produces a ton of content along those lines. And so I think I would say it's not that new, but applying it to digital takes a lot of focus”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it actually has to do with how the world was when we were growing up. And so in our early adult life, for us, that was the 90s as a generation, now I'm generalizing, but very comfortable times overall. And we were encouraged to really look outward. And so there's a millennial perspective where people are looking for purpose. For some employers, that means that their millennial employees are really annoying. But what it means is we're looking for more and have grown up in the world where now, you know, in our adult life, we're sort of constantly looking for meaning and purpose. And that's a different mindset than Gen X. And even if you look at Gen Z, which grew up in the 2000s, was at home during the financial crisis, is actually looking for stability. And so like Gen Z and Gen Y are very, very different. Gen Y being millennials.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a combination of both, but I do think they are different than Gen X for sure. They might actually look a little bit more like Boomers did in the 60s, but they don't look anything like Gen X. Why not?”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so not all of them reach the same audiences. It's actually hard to build trust amongst this generation. It's super skeptical, very upset with older generations, not in tune with what's happening in cable news, not in tune with what's happening in print news, and looking for their own voice and own way to do things. So that sort of by default has hurt some legacy publishers. And then if you look in the news space, there are a few people doing really interesting things reinventing journalism and reinventing distribution. And I think we're one of them. But I don't think it's a list of 20”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think you're right that we're all good at distributing content over social because that's where our audience is. But I would say there are pretty meaningful differences in the way content is created and what kind of content is created. But it's a competitive space for sure. But I would say I wouldn't lump Mike and Vox in with 20 other digital media news companies.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is not doable. No, no, that's when we were like, okay, whatever we're doing is great. We got to figure out something much better. And that was our approach. And so every day we learn something else. And the first milestone was, you know, we got to 400,000 monthly Unix pretty quickly and then went out to raise money. And, you know, the story was this is a big, smart, young generation that's been underserved by traditional media. You know, let's build the smart brand for them. And the response from investors was, you know, since when do millennials care about the things that are smart, they only want snackable, clickable, you know, funny stuff, sports and comedy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we convinced a few investors that this was an okay idea.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were a hundred things. I mean, we would sit every day at the end of the day looking at Google Analytics together and say, okay, where are we at? Where do we need to go? And I remember sort of like month two, we were looking at, okay, we had like 2,500 visits today, like, okay, back into a rough CPM, this is going to be a premium business, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, we need to do somewhere between two and a half to four million visits a day if this is going to work. Okay, so how many times do we need, you know, by how many X do we need to grow this?”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we gave ourselves about eight months in the beginning. We didn't have any investors. Jake and I both put money in and we're like, okay, well, we'll probably spend this 150 grand sometime this year. So by the time this money's over, we better have raised money again. And so the goal was, okay, let's see what kind of audience and engagement we can build over the next eight months. That's how long we had. And the first milestone we hit was probably fall of 2011, we figured out how to start generating traffic. And at first, it was a combination of search and social, but pretty heavy on search. And we figured out how to grow the site to about 400,000 monthly uniques within, you know, three, four months.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And some people are, I don't know, they're shy of the word pivot. They think it's got a negative connotation, having been at a startup at least once, I think it's a good thing means that we tried something. The odds are it wasn't going to work, so we tried something else”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the first version we built after we left our jobs. What we left our jobs to do was, we didn't really know, we didn't have a super solid business plan, but that was the first iteration of what we built.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we played around with a pretty fancy commenting system that we built in the beginning. We had a pretty large contributor pool that would get points and ratings up and down. It was a little bit medium-esque in the early days. And that was probably the first.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, so we had this one guy posting dispatches from Tunisia, which was incredible. And then we had a bunch of people writing opinion from New York or California or Texas about what they thought about politics today. And there was everything in between in the beginning. The thing we did know was that this was an audience that was underengaged by traditional brands. And there was something differently to be done, exactly what it was we were going to figure it out.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First day of the Arab Exactly. And so it was sort of like a crazy dispatch. It ended with the roommate of the guy who was writing getting shot in the leg, sent us a picture. We posted it. We didn't know what we were doing in terms of distribution. We didn't know what we were doing in terms of sourcing or quality or any of those types of things. But after staying up for 24 hours and posting all his stories, we sort of looked at each other. We're like, whoa, this is it.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, so the thought was there's a level of discourse and dialogue missing from the general conversation and that our generation sees the world really differently and that if we could channel that, it could become hopefully very powerful. And so we actually had the thing that catalyzed us leaving our jobs was Jake had just come back from the Middle East. He had recruited a contributor who was working in Tunisia. He was in Tunis. He was a teacher in Tunis, one of Jake's friends. I think it was early December. I was at Goldman Still on my desk. Jake called me and said, hey, you know, David, our writer in Tunisia sent me this crazy email. Something's going down there. Can you post this stuff? And so went home, got on my computer, it was like 2.30 in the morning, and emails started coming in from David. It was sort of like middle of the morning in Tunisia. We started posting, and that was the beginning of the year.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. It was called Policy Make, and the idea was that there's a bunch of political energy, political ideas that aren't being channeled or discussed, that conversation was moving onto Facebook and Twitter at a huge volume. This was, you know, we started it right before the Arab Spring, actually.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, I think it's actually pretty representative of our millennial mindset in a certain bizarre way. We're very purpose driven. And I was learning a lot at Goldman. It's a place with a bunch of smart people. You know, the average IQ of 10,000 people there is probably the highest of any company in the world. But I wasn't necessarily fulfilled and I had a real passion to do something meaningful. And this was an idea that came up and came around. And so we actually initially started testing it while we both had our jobs.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it was originally called Policy Mike, and I started it with a friend of mine from high school, Jake Horowitz. We've been buddies since we were 14 back in the jazz band at Horseman in the Bronx. He was editor in chief of our high school paper. After college, he went over to Lebanon to be a reporter. I went to Goldman after working in politics. And when he moved back to New York, we reconnected over this idea that there was a lot of energy and different thinking happening amongst our peers and amongst our generation and that that wasn't being channeled.”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mike is building the most trusted news site for millennials. We reach 30 million people a month around the world and are just starting”
2016-01-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Chris Altchek, Mic CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT