Smith: We reached about 150 million in audience. It’s come back down, but it’s still, I’d say around 20 to 25 percent above the 2019 averages.

On subscriptions, we saw a 178 percent increase in March. While we’re seeing the spike from COVID-19 level off, we’re still seeing higher than average new subscriber acquisitions, with May being up about 75 percent versus the January and February benchmarks.

Smith: Early data suggests our new subscribers from March and April are behaving similar to previous cohorts. It’s stable.

Smith: It’s a combination, obviously. The interest in the ever-expanding news stories — from coronavirus to the economy to the social unrest and the social justice movement. All of that. And in our case, all of that impact on the economy. It also ties in with our increased investment into the subscription business. We’ve invested into it incrementally beyond what we were planning to do this year, and so we’ve been able to capture more subscribers due to increased investment as well.

Smith: We’re clearly one of the most global media companies. We have large operations in China and in Hong Kong and in Asia, and we were closely monitoring the situation in Asia when the outbreak began in Wuhan. It began seeping into Hong Kong and many of our employees in Asia began working from home from the middle of January.

We were monitoring that and managing through that, but it was a different crisis for our New York-based staff. There was very little connecting of the dots early on, that this was going to sweep the entire planet and that those radical changes to everyone’s life and approach to working would in fact be affecting us months later.

Smith: We could have a done a few things on the margin. We could have prepared a little bit more for a work-from-home world. We could have had a little bit more time to plan for this transition — it ended up being quite abrupt. We made it through that.

If you think about the scale of what we do around the world, we operate six global media platforms that all operate internationally. They are headquartered between the Americas, Europe, Middle East, and Asia Pacific.

I think it was in the middle of March — March 10, March 15, around the — that we literally moved everyone into work from home. One of the advantages of having the Asian operation is that we did learn quite a bit about how to produce live television in a work-from-home environment — how to do a live hit from your balcony.

I’m really proud to see this large, multi-platform organization literally move into full 24/7 operation without any reduction in content volume, any reduction in speed, and in my view, in accuracy or in content quality to a large extent.

Today we’re operating at about 97 percent work-from-home globally.

Smith: Bloomberg Media’s audience is truly global — 40 percent of our subscribers are outside of the U.S.

Smith: It was May 2018, so it’s now two years old. We’ve had a very strong first year, strong first 18 months, exceeding all of our expectations. Our paywall model is unique and different in that it’s a very premium-priced model. We charge $34.99 a month after the initial trial. The initial trials, which range from one month to three months, obviously we discount. But within three months, everyone is moved up to the full price of $34.99 a month or $415 a year. We don’t discount beyond the initial offers, and we don’t play games with extended initial offers.

Our biggest lessons were in the discounting of the initial offer. That’s where we’ve experimented a lot and have been able to really increase our volume of profitable subscriptions. We don’t acquire subscriptions that are not going to be profitable on a relatively short-term lifetime-value perspective. We’re not interested in just growing the number for growing the number.

The other area we learned was in the relationship between the meter and the advertising inventory. We started with a meter of 10 articles a month, because we have a very large digital advertising business which has done very well across the years. We obviously didn’t want to put that in jeopardy — not that we were selling out 100 percent of our inventory, but we were still nervous about calibrating the right meter level to not cannibalize or hurt our ad business.

Smith: It’s a universal meter. We put our coronavirus coverage outside the meter for public service purposes, and at times when we introduce a new product — like, when we launched Bloomberg Green, I think we put it outside the paywall for a period of time, from a promotional perspective. [Bloomberg is now doing the same with the just-relaunched CityLab, which it acquired from Smith’s old employer, Atlantic Media.] We’ve ended up tracking very similarly with what The New York Times and The Washington Post have done, and obviously where the Journal has been for a long time. It’s actually ending up at a very, very tight meter.

Smith: Two to three right now.

Smith: Obviously, The Wall Street Journal is the largest incumbent competitor. And the Financial Times would be the second, both in terms of subscription volume and pricing. They’re both premium-priced global business news brands, and to a large extent that’s a core micro market that we operate in. We actually wanted to be the most premium priced offering in the market.

Smith: 63,000 new subscriptions in one month, March — about 4× normal.

Smith: We’re not going to go on the record with that right now.

Smith: Well, because we were later entrants into the paywall business, we really did have the benefit of being able to study a lot of the successful incumbents. There’s a lot that you can learn from the outside — from a technology perspective, from a marketing perspective, from a pricing perspective, from a product perspective.

At the top of every one of my lists, the super ingredient is talent. I need a more exaggerated, even stronger name than “super ingredient.” Because the more I’m in this business, the more that singular point comes important. It’s just amazing.

I mean not to sound dramatic, it’s sort of a life-and-death question, really. If you are exacting about your talent standard, and if you have patience and are smart and thorough, you can commit to building a world-class talent culture that is going to attract this very rarefied talent and retain it. You live and thrive.

Smith: Right — not just the greatest talent, but talent within the handful of organizations with the greatest success and the greatest experimentation.

That’s a principle of our success — creating a powerful cross-disciplinary, collaborative, team culture and operational approach. Because there are deeply connected functional components to executing a successful paywall. It obviously starts with the journalism and the editors. And then there’s like a chain link pulling to the digital product people who are capturing the journalism, the digital product format, who are deeply linked with the digital consumer marketing experts, who are deeply linked to the engineers.

Obviously, the name of the game in digital consumer marketing is being able to test and learn, test and learn, test and learn, test and learn, and having a technology infrastructure that fully enables you to do that rapidly and quickly is an important advantage. I know that some other people, if you don’t make that decision early on on the technology front, it can be a real hindrance. Fortunately, we knew that from some of the great talent that had experience and we were able to make those choices.

Smith: Bloomberg Media is powered by a newsroom of 2,700 journalists and analysts in 120 bureaus around the world. In Bloomberg Media, we have 1,200 people. We have a significant competitive advantage in global content because of the scale and size of the Bloomberg newsroom, 2,700 journalists around the world. More than a thousand are based across Asia Pacific, for instance.

The challenge and an opportunity for Bloomberg is that we don’t come from a consumer media offering, which was very competitive. Honestly, from a product perspective with the Journal and the FT, we actually create more content and publish more content than the two main incumbents. So as we looked out at the opportunity for our consumer subscription business, the world is truly our focus and hopefully will be our oyster, because we have regional editions on the website. You can go to the menu and get an Asian sort of filter, or an African filter, or a European filter, or a Middle Eastern filter. They’re really just filters — they don’t restrict the rest of the content. They’ll just surface the regional content more prominently on the app and on the website. That’s really been a huge area of growth.

Smith: The facts are that Bloomberg Media is already by many metrics the No. 1 global business media company on the planet. I mean, there is no one in our category that operates simultaneously six different global business-focused media platforms all around the world at the standard that we do.

We have Bloomberg TV distribution in 300 million homes around the world. Local-language joint ventures, where we actually produce Bloomberg TV in a local market in a local language — Bloomberg TV in Mexico in Spanish, Bloomberg TV in India, Bloomberg TV in Turkey…even in Mongolia, we have a Bloomberg TV partnership.

The digital platforms, in an average month, is 60 million on platform, 60 million off-platform — so a 120 million global footprint for our digital properties. We have a local-language Japanese Bloomberg.com which is one of the top Japanese-language sites. And we’re growing our digital presence with these new verticals and brands like Bloomberg Green and Bloomberg CityLab and a number of other things.

Smith: Bloomberg LP is the top company — the holding company essentially, right? Bloomberg Media and the terminal business are divisions. The terminal business is called Financial Products. Financial Products also has the Enterprise Data business, which is a B2B data-licensing business. And then there’s Bloomberg Industry, which houses Bloomberg Government and Bloomberg Law.

And then this is Bloomberg Media, designed as a vertically integrated model where — the way Bloomberg Media was originally conceived — the media is designed to drive value in numerous forms to the Bloomberg terminal business, to Bloomberg’s Financial Products business. And obviously, we’re building the brand, driving influence.

Smith: The numbers are great. [QuickTake has 414,000 YouTube subscribers.] Obviously, the news cycle has been significant, and QuickTake’s been doing a lot of content around the U.S. social unrest and obviously the George Floyd story. That’s been a major, major focus. We’ve been doing some longer-form content and continue to get very large audiences. Total video views across all social platforms in Q1 2020 grew 64 percent year over year and 17 percent compared to the fourth quarter of 2019.

QuickTake hit its highest number of video views in March, with 137 million total across platforms. In March, it also surpassed 1 million followers on Twitter and doubled in number of subscribers on its YouTube channel.

Smith: Some are longer — some are up to 5 minutes. QuickTake’s dedicated journalist team of almost 100 people around the world are part of the Bloomberg, the overall editorial empire, but they’re actually dedicated to QuickTake.

The whole logic of QuickTake is to leverage the broader Bloomberg news ecosystem and news gathering operation. When we want to do a story for that large target audience of global 20-somethings, global 30-somethings, we want to do a story on the disappearance of the North Korean leader, we can spin it out very quickly by doing a split-screen interview with the Bloomberg news reporter who’s the expert on it. The same would go for a story on a new development at Amazon or a new development in U.S. politics or with the coronavirus. It’s a layer on top of the large, 2,700-strong Bloomberg news organization.

Smith: The answer is that, if there is any part of the advertising ecosystem that you actually want to be leaning into for 2020, 2021, 2022, it’s this demographic on mobile, on social, and in video. When things come back, as they will, I think that traditional advertising will probably suffer, and you want to move your business and your model to the place on the media chessboard where the dollars are going to be going.

The huge transition of television dollars moving to OTT is a great place to be. And our platform modernization is actually a growth area, because you put a really compelling advertising offering by creating content and segments that live on the platform and that form sort of a brand space, brand unit on a platform.

It allows you to actually challenge platform dollars, which can then be shifted over to a publisher. You’re effectively offering a high-quality content unit that exists in a platform, and that’s been successful, too. We’re going after the platform dollars, by offering quality brand space content that is units, if you will, that exist on platform and amplified on platform. I think that’s going to be a major area for innovation.

Smith: Exactly. A move forward is going to be how publishers and platforms collaborate on mutually profitable efforts —serving content to platform readers that is getting created by publishers and creates more equitable monetization models.

Our Twitter deal with TikToc actually was that. I’ve talked at length in the media about how Twitter really allowed us to launch QuickTake because they customized an advertising monetization agreement that made it actually profitable for us to be able to build a specialty media brand on their platform.

Smith: We are going to be launching Bloomberg QuickTake OTT — the streaming channel, global streaming channel — with, at the outset, 10 or 11 hours of streaming global video news content. That will complement existing social video content. We’re going to be moving towards around-the-clock streaming of very high quality independent, fact-based business and general interest video news.

Our internal editorial tagline or north star is “The world decrypted,” and we want Bloomberg QuickTake to be that for the next generation of business leaders and young influentials — that 20-something, that 30-something audience that’s effectively consuming their news and their video news on mobile, on social, and soon will be consuming it on OTT.

QuickTake was designed to be our sort of global video. Obviously, both eyeballs and ad dollars are shifting, globally, to social video spending and to OTT spending. The transition of ad dollars in America and around the world to OTT, over the next five years, is staggering. It’s like $150 billion or something.

Smith: As people around the globe cut the cord and are beginning to develop new relationships with new global news brands, sure, they’re all familiar with CNN and maybe familiar with Bloomberg TV if they’re in business and finance. But Bloomberg QuickTake we’re looking to wedge into that younger audience.

Smith: It’s an older audience and it’s more markets-and-finance focused than what Bloomberg QuickTake will be.

Smith: It’s a market that’s very hard to enter into because the scale that’s required to compete.

What we’re seeing now — and I say this with a lot more sadness than competitive happiness — is that all the players that were experimenting and trying to do this as well are retreating because of the coronavirus crisis. You’re seeing major job cuts and major pullback from any of the next-generation disruptors. And you’re seeing also pullbacks, frankly, from the large globally scaled traditional news organizations.

Smith: Marketers are beginning to assign more emotional value to virtual events, which is good. Virtual events are clearly going to become an additional event format in the future that didn’t really exist before. When we come back to live events, when it’s safe to, I think virtual events will be another tool in our toolbox as publishers — which is exciting. Because it’s obvious they can reach very, very large audiences and serve very engaged and interactive audience experiences.

Smith: They’re starting to.

Smith: I think the jury’s still out on that. I’m pretty sure there’ll be a discount in terms of the revenues one can generate on virtual events versus live events. Obviously, the cost structure is lower than live events, but it’s not nothing.

That’s the other thing about virtual events: To do them really well is more complicated than just pulling together a quick Zoom call. There’s much more sophisticated virtual event software and other technology integration to make the experience much, much better. That actually does have costs associated with it.

We’ve pivoted our live event staff towards virtual events. It’s the same people doing that. I think we’ve had to complement our live events staff with more technology talent — getting some of our engineers and other folks from digital products much more involved. That’s been the main change.

Smith: The live events piece which we’ve built is really a great point of pride for our company.

Smith: It did.

Smith: In 2019, it represented about 15 to 20 percent of the business.

Smith: That’s absolutely right. I once heard the term revenue promiscuity.

Smith: The idea that you shouldn’t turn your nose up at any revenue stream.

I think of one little micro-innovation that we’ve developed at Bloomberg in particular — and we started with this a little bit with the launch of Quartz at The Atlantic. When you take a single brand like Bloomberg or The Atlantic and you diversify, you diversify all the way — as far as you can.

You start with ads, then you go to paid stuff, and then you try e-commerce, and then you try research, and then you try marketing services — and at one point you’ve tried everything, right?

But when there are just no more diversification options, you actually can come up with the new form of revenue diversification by jumping the wall and creating a new business, an adjacent business that leverages all the assets of your core business but is an entirely new business.