YouSaid · the spoken record

Nilay Patel

lines on the record: 81
first: 2024-03-04
most recent: 2024-03-04
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

“Of you all, we won't do it because we are so protective of the journalism that we make. And I worry, honestly, that the audience doesn't care anymore. We're just like, whatever. Like the audience is just assumes that we're bought and paid for left and right. And like, no.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saw ads, you know, we have YouTube pre roll, they're sponsored content on the website, it's big disclosures, but there's advertiser content on our website. So all the ways that media companies make money except the way that individual creators make a lot of money, which is directly making the brand deals for our talent. So I don't know any of the podcast ads. Most podcasters just read the ads. We will not stop a YouTube video in the middle and let any of our journalists do the brand read or whatever. We have somebody else who does that, which is Andrew Melazak. He's great. He's part of our advertising team. He does them. He's very good at them. That's great. But someone else does them. And so that we just maintain and enforce this distance between our work as journalists and what advertisers would like us to say. And I think that is, again, many YouTubers are very, very successful. They make a lot of money. I don't begrudge anybody their businesses. Go be successful. I am proud.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So, this is the real hard thing, but the main way we make money is we sell advertising. Senator, we sell ads. And we sell display ads on our website banners and boxes. We have some ideas on how to make those experiences better. We sell ads on the podcast. I don't read them. Not as ludicrous if I did read them.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That over time can grow because it's kind of fun to be smart. So I think people, they latch onto that and they evangelize how they feel to their friends and then the audience grows again and again. I feel like telling Hank Green it's fun to be smart is like one of the funniest things I could possibly do like I truly do And also, that We are very precious about how we turn things into money. And I think this has helped us, it has almost entirely helped us. It has hurt us in one particular way, which is we don't make as much money as influencers do. I can talk about why that is.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things I say all the time is I can go up to anyone in the world and ask them about their phone and they will tell me a story because they have an emotional relationship with this piece of technology that mediates almost all of their other relationships. So there's something they love. There's something they're frustrated about. There's something they wish was better. And if you can ask them the right questions, everyone has a story to tell you about their phone. That is a pretty massive set of things to think about. So I think of our audience as people who want to feel those feelings like they want to love things. They want to dislike things. They want to be passionate about these objects, these screens that literally mediate almost everything else that happens in our lives. And I think we poke at that pretty hard all the time. And we're never punished for thinking too hard about things. And that to me is like the surest sign that we've at least found a group of people that are stable.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our mission statement is at the Verge is a website about how technology makes people feel? We've kind of narrowed it down. We've had headier ones. We have ones that were designed for advertisers We've had ones that are like, we're about the future, and like over time, it's like, oh no, we're just about how this makes you feel. It is a very emotional website about cell phones. And that means we can be expansive. It means we can validate the fact that people are having emotional experiences with their technology.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is Hank Green, guest host of Decoder, and we're back with the Verge editor-in-chief Neil Patel about building audiences on the Internet and how to turn that into a profitable business. That goes back to the conversation we were having before about audience and how do you imagine those people, like who are they in your head? And how do you feel like you understand them? This is a huge thing for me. I think about it all the time.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are there people here who are actually making real money? On YouTube in particular, I think is YouTube has figured out monetization in a way that feels healthiest in most stable. But there's also the haves and have-nots. And I think that YouTube loves having the haves because it provides the infinite incentive to the have-nots. None of that is true on a regular media company's website. None of that, if you started a WordPress site tomorrow, none of that would be true about your WordPress site. But the first instinct was let's at least make it easier to publish. Like let's at least remove the barriers to entry to getting on the website. And then we can do comments and then we can think about how we can distribute in different ways. So that is working. Like my team is happier. We did not know that the Twitter thing would happen, but the Twitter thing happened and our desire to publish in the boxes we controlled went up as a group. And then on top of it, our audience saw that we were having fun.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It doesn't, you just pick one, name a company that makes a CMS. They're like, is this as fun to use as Twitter? And the answer is no. Flatly know, even the one we have now for Quick Post is not as fun to use as Twitter was in its heyday. Will this immediately bring me the dopamine hit of immediate feedback”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fuck you, pay me. He typed furiously for free into another box. Like, it's very confusing. And there's a lot of reasons. If you just sit back and think about why, there's a million reasons why. One, the software is nicer to use than most CMSs.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remember, this is pre Elon. My number one goal was boy, I'd like the reporters who work here to write for us in the text box that pays us money instead of over there in the text box that extracts value.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We definitely changed too much too fast. We dialed it back a little bit, and now we're starting to reintroduce some of those other changes. But the core piece of it. Which is are we making our own website the most valuable place that we work has been wildly successful to the point where I'm sometimes like we're doing too many quick posts. We should make longer things again. I think that's a good sign because my number one goal.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I get it. The version's a collective, right? It's a group of individuals who want to make something together. And that means when we go to play on a platform that is organized around someone talking to you, like a TikTok or Instagram reels or YouTube shorts or whatever, it's a different person every time that stands in for this other thing. But if you look at the cover of Vogue this month, it's like all of the vogue legends, like all the icons and like Oprah is in the center of that picture and it's all of these supermodels around Oprah. And it's like no TikToker can create that moment. Only an institution can create that moment. And the moment has to provide value back to all of those people, right? You're on the cover of Vogue with all these other people. So interesting.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I feel that tension all the time. But I think the idea that people trust people more than brands is a creation of the algorithmic media environment. It is not the natural result of people getting smarter or becoming savvier media consumers. That's just the water we're in”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They want that to be true. They want to say people don't trust brands. They trust people and that the brands stand for nothing. And that's because when you shove a brand into the same incentive structure as a group of individuals, an infinite supply of teenagers will work for free, the brands debase themselves. And now the brands are worth nothing. But all the celebrities still want to be on the cover of magazines. Like they want the validation that the big brand that the institution can provide. And there's a reason for that because the brand stands for more than just an individual opinion, or at least at its best it does. There are a lot of problems with that. My little blog that people now think of as an institution started out in opposition to big magazines. We were the upstarts.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I totally disagree with that. I think that's like you're platform pilled. I totally disagree with that. Like in the biggest, most serious ways that I can possibly think of the platforms are designed to create that idea and reinforce it.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe I could sell it. Maybe I could just let some other people run it. Maybe it stands for something. Maybe we could shut it down and everyone could talk about how much they missed it. But it's more than you. And I think the platforms are not organized economically to ever allow that to happen because that is expensive. And you can replace individuals all the time.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the defining economic reality of the modern platform media world is that all the platformers realize that an infinite supply of teenage creators are cheaper to deal with than media companies or groups of media individuals or powerful creators. And I'm curious for your read on sort of the number of YouTubers that you see kind of retiring or taking a step back. It just feels like eventually you hit a point where like there's nothing left here for me, it's just me. Like I have to just extract more from myself and put it on this platform every day to succeed. And that stops being valuable. Whereas I think if you were able to build a company or a brand or an institution, at the end of that, you're like, well, I made this. Yeah.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me answer that question two different ways. You're touching on something that we talk about a lot. People might have heard Casey Newton get at this in the last time he was on the show. It's pretty easy to get traffic in the world. You can go on TikTok today and get some traffic and get some views. It is really hard to build an audience. And I think a lot of the destruction we see in the media community right now is no one built an audience. They try to get traffic and then they try to sell that traffic and they assume the traffic would last forever. The platforms have no incentives to let you keep having traffic forever and they absolutely do not have incentive for you to have so much audience that you get leverage over the platforms. Right. Such they might have to pay you a higher rate.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If we It does feel like there was a time when blog posts were first a thing, when it was very sort of like, I have a blog, this is me, and I have this relationship with my audience. And there was a lot of like, you know, there was a snark and there was creativity. And I see this tossed in with stuff at the verge today that that influence still sort of like comes through. It feels like, and like I struggle with this as a YouTuber and, you know, like this sort of transcendent the algorithm kind of thing. It feels like the way to do that is to have a community, not just like numbers, not just views, not just impressions, but like humans who you have a relationship with somehow. How do you imagine those people?”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Openly have more fun on the website, business insiders doing that, Semaphore is doing that in other ways. And that's what I mean is like, oh, if you start writing for other people, which is the heart of what a blog post really is, like it's you trying to entertain yourself and trying to entertain just a handful of other people, you're going to go really much farther than trying to satisfy the robot.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and the last platform on the web of any scale or influence is Google search. And so over time, web pages have become dramatically optimized for Google search. And that means the kinds of things people write about, the containers that we write in, are mostly designed to be optimized for Google search. They're not designed for, I need to just quickly tell you about this and move on. And our little insight was, well, what if we just don't do that? What if we only write for the people who come directly to our website instead of the people who find our articles through search or Google Discover or whatever other Google platforms are in the world? And so we just made these little blog posts. And the idea was if you just come to our website one more time a day because there's one more thing to look at that you'll like, like we will be fine. And I think if you look around the media landscape right now, we did that a year or so ago. More and more people are starting to realize, oh, we should just make the websites more valuable. And the easiest way to make the websites more valuable is to have our talented people make more stories and not just like more stories, but have more.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. You have also said that you are going to revolutionize the media with blog posts. This is a similar sentence in that we are also referring to an anachronistic thing almost in the form of blog post, but we're going to move forward by moving backward a little bit somehow. What do you mean when you say that? I'm going to make you explain yourself”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way I think about it is that I don't have anyone else's algorithm to think about, and that is a really important to me. But then I look at all of the most important creators and the most influential members of the new media and what they are is so successful that they have transcended algorithms on other people's platforms. So I'll just point to Marquez Brownley, who I think is an amazing reviewer and great tech YouTuber. He has transcended the YouTube algorithm and has afforded him a kind of success that I think a lot of people are frankly jealous of. Sometimes I'm jealous of it. But I never think about YouTube and I'm very happy with never really thinking about YouTube in that way. I think there's a tension there where that's what the website affords you. If you can build an audience for the website, but building an audience for a website is almost impossible.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It feels strange. You won, and it's like, oh, I don't actually like it. It turns out that when you're put into the arena and you're the last man standing, there's just like a lot of carnage around, which isn't that much of a triumph. It feels like it hurts a little bit. It's weird to be us our age and hear that the word website feels almost anachronistic. It feels of another era.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a ferocious Rush of energy and money and attention into websites has obviously faded, right? We're not making those the same way we used to anymore. And then I look at my peer group and so many of them are gone. And that's so that to me, there's like a, it's that. It's all the things the people and the properties that I used to wake up in fear of. Many of them are radically different than they used to be, and we're still here, and that feels strange to me.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little bit of a joke, it's 50 a joke. I'm aware that there are other websites what I specifically mean is we were founded in a boom time of websites. We were founded in 2011. We started talking about the site in 2010. We remain part of a venture-backed digital media startup. There were a lot of those back then. We had a lot of competition in 2011, meaningful, like we were scared of them competition. Read right web existed and we tried to beat them every day. TechCrunch was a very different kind of publication back then. We tried to beat them all the time. And I really respect the people I competed against. I came up at Angadget competing ferociously against the people at Gizmodo. And we became first rivals and then really good friends out of that competition. Some of those sites still exist. Some of them are still doing great work. Some of them still have great people. But that moment when they were”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's our org Well, get ready because those questions are coming. I'm super excited about this. It's very cool. It's very cool that we get to do this. You think a lot and have a lot of good ideas and talk to a lot of people about, I think, things that are very present suddenly, more present now than they have been the internet. It feels like has been tossed up into the air and we can see it all fall down and see where it lands a little bit. It's an election year. That's awful. I hate those. And there's just a lot of reasons to be thinking about the kinds of things you think about right now. So I'm really glad to get to talk to you. But let's start about you being the person who runs the last website on Earth. Because you say things all the time and that you don't explain them, which I love.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Funny when I first proposed this, you were like, this is amazing because it's so much harder to host than to be interviewed. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to have to do a bunch of work on this. Whereas when you interviewed me, I just like showed up. Now you're just showing up. Now you get to feel though. You get to feel what it's like.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That publishes content and isn't behind a paywall yet still makes money. How does he do it? How does he make decisions? How is the Verge structured? The tables have turned. You'll also hear Neil try to convince me that the Fetiverse isn't just happening, but that it's also going to be important and that we should be paying attention to it, and that it is going to make the internet better. And I think I maybe even got a Fetaverse-related Verge scoop in here. One of the wildest moments of this conversation for me was when I made a comment that I thought was just like a universally believed truth about the post-platform internet, that people these days prefer individuals to brands. And the Neili told me, no, that's wrong. It's not people who are doing that. It's the systems that deliver that content to people. A distinction that I'm going to be thinking about for a long, long time. He won't say it, of course, so I will. Neili is a defining voice of this very bizarre moment in the history of media.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Hank Green. I'm a science guy. I help run an educational media company called Complexly. And I'm also a big fan of this podcast. I am not, however, the editor-in-chief of The Verge, but Nehai Patel is, and Decoder is Neil's show about big ideas and other problems. One of those problems is that one of the best possible guests for decoder is unfortunately also the host of decoder. So while we get to hear a lot of Neil's thoughts on a lot of this stuff, when I listen to this podcast, I often think, man, I would like to hear Neil interviewed on his own podcast. And so I went on to threads, and I made that joke, and Neil responded, let's do it. And so now, this is it. We are doing it. Neil has got some weird ideas about the internet. For example, that he is going to revolutionize the media through blog posts. He keeps saying it. But what the hell does he mean? While I was busy building my business on other people's platforms, Neil has built something very rare in the year 2024.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT