Everyone Has Something to Say About TED, Because It Sells Middle-Class Taste

What we most love to talk about these days is not liberty, equality and fraternity, but technology, entertainment and design

TED is 10 years old. More precisely, TED Global is. Ten years ago, on July 12-15, the first TED Global conference met in Oxford, England. Its guests included some famous names: the biologist Richard Dawkins, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia's head of design strategy. Later editions were held in Tanzania, South Africa and Rio de Janeiro.

A TED talk explains one thing clearly in 18 minutes.

The three letters stand for Technology, Entertainment and Design, and at first most speakers kept to those three subjects. An architect named Richard Saul Wurman founded TED in 1984, but from 2002 this loosely run organization passed into the hands of a man named Chris Anderson, who began to change how it worked and put the 18-minute talks on a website. Today the TED talk is one of the most recognizable video formats on the internet. It is not short: next to the most common video lengths, it looks long. Nor is it light: light content is entertaining and funny, while a TED talk is a lecture, and a serious one.

None of this has stopped it from becoming hugely popular. In 2003 TED took in US$3 million; by 2012 that figure was US$45.1 million. Its videos have been viewed more than 1 billion times in total, and they now get 2 million views a day. You may also notice that a book tends to sell better when its cover says "TED speaker."

TED is also a label. The TEDx events held near you, which you can join, are one of the forms it licenses. On Twitter you can find 88 organizations running offline events under the TEDx name; on Weibo, a search for "TEDx" returns more than 50 pages of results.

Why is TED so popular? Because it sells middle-class taste

TED. Technology, entertainment, design: in recent years these have been close to the three most important words in personal consumption. The founder, Richard Saul Wurman, saw this in 1984.

"In the early 1980s, technology, entertainment and design were changing, and not many people could see it. I saw it, and I thought it was an opportunity." He wanted to invite well-known people from every field to talk about the new things constantly appearing in these three areas. The crude-looking prototypes shown at that first TED conference later became things people were happy to buy: a piece of 3D imagery shown by Lucasfilm, from the group that became Pixar; the 128K Macintosh shown by Steve Jobs; and a speech-recognition technology shown by the MIT Media Lab.

In fact, TED's history runs longer than 10 years. In 1990 TED held its first talks in Long Beach, California: the TED conference we know today. It has been held every year since. And TED grasped one core idea: technology, entertainment and design are all places where middle-class tastes meet.

Start with how many technologies have changed our lives since TED was born. You get up in the morning and glance at the news on your phone. Before breakfast you might strap on a fitness band and go for a short run. You look up on a map where you need to go later. At the office you switch on the air purifier and put on Bluetooth earphones to listen to some music. Before bed you pick up your Kindle and read for a while. Every year new technologies appear, and they shape how we live.

We need entertainment more and more, and we want to understand the world in simple, interesting ways. In middle-class life, entertainment is what most easily becomes the interesting part, and the more attention we pay to ourselves, the more we are willing to spend on it. Three years ago, global smartphone sales overtook PC sales: entertainment pushed technology forward.

As for design: what could display your superior taste better than a well-designed, one-of-a-kind product with a designer's name on it? Whether it is a phone, home furnishings or a product like Airbnb, if it is aimed at the middle class, the designer is sure to be a key member of the team.

Put simply, the three fields TED has focused on from the start have a lot in common. All three are a more upmarket kind of consumption, and all three are good at steering people toward new kinds of consumption. A very large share of those consumers is the middle class. What TED's famous speakers say is, to a great extent, an expression of middle-class taste. That was the right trend to catch: do one thing right, ride the right trend, and your odds of winning rise sharply.

Of course, pandering to the middle class does not guarantee a product it likes. TED succeeded for other reasons too

TED became what it is today largely because Chris Anderson took it over in 2002. By then he had founded two companies: a magazine publisher called Future and a consumer internet company called Snowball. But the 2000 Nasdaq crash hit both of his ventures hard, and it was during this period that he came to see TED's value. In 2001 he bought TED, and it became a project of the Sapling Foundation, which he had set up.

Then came the videos. Chris Anderson put the talks online and within three months had launched the website TED.com. Within a year the videos had passed 10 million views; within six years they had reached 1 billion. Unlike the expensive tickets, the videos were free, and they spread widely. The standout in online video at the time was YouTube. Founded in 2005, by 2006 it already drew 6 million viewers a day. People were also getting interested in making entertaining videos then, as with some websites built mainly around games.

But compared with videos whose main draw was being funny and fun, TED was not short, and it was fairly serious. What it did was break the knowledge we once had to get from books into fragments and present them as PowerPoint slides. Before that, if you wanted to understand something, you had to spend a long time reading; TED sorts it out for you in 18 minutes. In 18 minutes Elon Musk can explain the problems behind Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity, and what he has learned and thought through over many years appears on the slides as they click past.

But it is not easy to get every speaker to keep to time and deliver the most essential information vividly within it. On the TED stage, every speaker faces an 18-minute clock, and before they go on, the organizers usually work with them at length: how the slides can best fit the talk, which parts should be cut and which expanded. The organizers usually spend at least half a day with each speaker, over two or three rounds of conversations and meetings.

Elon Musk in conversation with Chris Anderson

So it has become a label, and a very expensive one, at US$7,500

What about attending the annual TED in person? It costs US$7,500 for four days of talks. When Chris Anderson decided to turn TED into videos, he worried about ticket revenue. He did raise the ticket price, yet he found that the number of people coming to hear TED only grew.

The more important question may be not why the annual TED is worth US$7,500, but why, now that the videos exist, even more people want to go in person. TED is already something like WWDC or Google I/O. Before the videos, it had done at least one thing: maintained quality. The videos only added mystique to these high-quality talks, so that "going to hear what they are talking about" became a pilgrimage, almost a religious rite. Over TED's four days, people see famous names packed close together. The setting and the sense of "being there," including the architecture of the chosen venue, the style of the services it offers (TED has always gone upmarket), and details that match the audience's values (reusing materials, recycling cans and the like), persuade those who can afford the price, and naturally lead them to spread TED's good name.

But not everyone can pay US$7,500 for four days of lectures, and TED has many other forms that you may have attended without being able to tell them apart. Besides the formal TED Conference, there are these similar-sounding names: TEDx, TED Fellows, TED Active...

TEDx: A brand-licensing format launched in 2009. Put simply, these are small TEDs scattered around the world: with official approval, people can invite experts in their area to run all kinds of small TED events. China in fact has more than a hundred officially licensed TEDx programs. Most are held at universities, though venues such as the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing's 798 Art District host them too. Prices vary: sometimes they are free, sometimes a ticket costs around a hundred yuan. Because they are organized by volunteers, quality problems are often hard to avoid.

TED Fellows: A program to find more talented people to join TED. It targets developing countries, and anyone under 40 can apply to become a TED Fellow. TED has the fellows give short talks, which is also how it hopes to bring in a steady stream of new topics and draw more interest.

TED Books: Questions that 18 minutes could not settle can be settled here. After the talks comes the reading, with books such as 100 Buildings of the Future, The Equation of Love and How We Will Live on Mars. But this is just another kind of fragmentation: users open an app called TED Books on their phones, where the material is offered.

TED-Ed: TED also does online courses, but compared with Coursera's, they are more like a self-help study hall. Users can upload any video themselves and add multiple-choice questions for students to answer after watching, along with notes and related material. Each video runs about four minutes.

TED Prize: Oh, and since 2005 TED has also awarded the TED Prize every year. It does not honor achievement; it funds wishes. Each year it grants three wishes "big enough to change the world," and the winners get US$100,000 to do what they proposed. Last year's winner was a radio producer named Dave Isay. His idea was a mobile app called StoryCorps that makes recorded interviews something people can share: users find someone on the street, open the app, interview them and have them tell their story, record it and upload it. Once enough recordings build up, you can open the app and hear people around the world telling their own stories.

So many people set out to copy it. Once TED became a very popular business, everyone, perhaps also out of kitsch, wanted to get in on it, but most copied only the surface. There have been many local attempts, such as Yixi. The challenge they face is that the audience still decides which platform to choose, so they still need real expertise and high-quality content, and that is exactly the problem many Chinese TED imitators now have. TED's success rests on technology, entertainment and design, but similar events in China still need a clearer focus. Timing matters too. TED, where the fragmentation began, knows well how to hold an audience's attention and keep things fresh. Most Chinese imitators, though, have no notion of strictly limiting talk length, and the content is simply whatever the speaker wants to say, very different from TED's practice of strict time limits and content settled in advance. Chinese imitators mostly copy the "invite someone to give a talk" part, and so far all they can give people is this kind of feeling: "At least I went and got to see someone famous," and "When I get back I can tell people I went to something a lot like TED."

But as a product aimed at the middle class, it also carries a whiff of kitsch

So TED has, without meaning to, given people a feeling: if you just spend enough time and watch all of this content, you will naturally know a field's technology and its future as thoroughly as the speakers do. TED has also become a standard feature of a new kind of kitsch. Watch an 18-minute video, and you are moved by how much cutting-edge knowledge you now understand; if you even feel like watching another, you marvel at your own dedication to learning; and if you happen to meet others who also watch TED, you are deeply stirred by the scene of joining hands to discover a new world. But the knowledge and insight TED offers are only surface. They have passed through someone else's thinking, and because the long work of thinking has been skipped by the time they reach the viewer, viewers believe such insight comes effortlessly.

TED's label is everywhere, too. Besides being used, as above, as shorthand for knowing everything, TED appears on book jacket bands as proof of authority, and the middle class can use it to show off its taste. TED means speaking well, showing taste, knowing a lot, being well-informed. Whatever the dinner-table conversation, the moment someone says, "I watched a TED talk the other day, and it said...," the topic suddenly feels more highbrow, and everyone wants to keep going.

Now let's look at a few influential TED videos

You have surely seen them. If you scroll through Weibo and check Moments now and then, there is no way to miss them. This is a product with a streak of kitsch: everyone who sees it, out of that same kitsch, cannot resist saying something about it. But looking back, we should still be grateful to it.

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