TED Talks Provide Hope For Intelligent Internet Video With 500 Million Views

When Director of TED Media June Cohen shopped around the idea for a television show featuring lectures from the organization’s famously elite conference, she was told the talks didn’t have mainstream appeal.

“When the BBC told me that TED talks were too intellectual for them, I thought it was time to change strategies,” she says.

Instead of television, TED ended up putting the TED talks online.

Cohen thought the presentations would mostly appeal to a small, geeky audience, but their impact has been much wider. TED’s video website, which broadcasts lectures online for free, celebrates its five-year anniversary on Monday. Since posting its first video, the site has collected about 500 million total video views, 1 million Facebook followers, and 1 million iPad app downloads.

Sure, none of the 1,000 videos have been viewed as many times as “Friday,” but they’ve been more successful than anyone at TED imagined they would be.

“Those numbers are really somewhat surprising, given the length of the videos, which is 18 minutes, and also the content,” Cohen says. “TED talks cover some majorly esoteric topics: Molecular biology, development policy, quantum physics, philosophy, poetry. … I think TED talks are proof that engaging, smart free video content can go viral no matter how long it is.”

Releasing the talks online for free has changed TED’s culture from one of closed, exclusive content to a platform for spreading ideas.

About 20 of the organization’s 50 employees now work with web, video and media, along with 7,000 volunteers from around the world translating TED talks into 81 languages. As a result, the majority of video views come from outside the United States. The organization launched a Q&A platform in February to encourage discussion around the videos.

On Monday, TED will release its first TED talk online that is not in English. The talk was recorded in Mexico at a TEDx event and will be broadcast in Spanish with English Subtitles.

The next step for TED, Cohen says, will be finding a better way to reach developing countries.

“There’s a real hunger in the world for meaning, for knowledge, for inspiration,” she says.