Why Bloomberg Invests in Media - Kevin Krim - Zing Talk

Today we're at the IGNITION Conference. We're with Bloomberg's Global Head of Web Properties, Kevin Krim. How ya doing Kevin?

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I'm doing good, thanks.

What do you do on a daily basis to run Bloomberg Web Properties?

We have Bloomberg.com and BusinessWeek.com and a couple smaller, digital products that are in our web properties. Together those are the fourth largest network of business and financial and news and data sites.

We, according to comScore SCOR, have over 20 million unique visitors a month, which puts us right behind the big two portals, Yahoo! YHOO and MSN MSFT and the Dow Jones network of sites. So that's really significant. That represents 40% growth year over year in our overall audience. Obviously we picked up BusinessWeek.com through the acquisition and have transformed that into Bloomberg BusinessWeek. So some of that growth we picked up through acquisition, but most of it has been organic.

A lot of people passed on BusinessWeek. Has that been very helpful? Very synergistic? I feel like you guys are getting more consumer-friendly. The website, Bloomberg.com, has changed drastically – I remember when it was just five or 10 headlines. Now you have categories and things like that. Can you talk towards that, the website redesign?

Let me tell you why we invest in media businesses. We see our media as not just glamorous marketing for Bloomberg. Instead, we see our media as strategically central to the health of our overall business. Now, obviously, we make most of our money and have a world-class business in our Bloomberg professional service, the Bloomberg Terminal.

That is all based on having breaking news that moves markets and having the most accurate, comprehensive data that professionals in the markets need. The way you get the best news and the best access to data is by being the most influential news organization in the world.

That's why we have media. That's why we have great websites, great TV, great mobile products, and radio and magazines. Because we need to be the most influential news service in the world so that the newsmakers, the people who are breaking the stories that move the markets so that they talk to us first. That's a competitive fight.

By having great media businesses, we support our overall business and as we sell more Terminals because of our breaking news and better data, we'll reinvest in media and that becomes a virtuous cycle.

In essence, if TV was losing money, perhaps it wouldn't matter. It could matter, but the idea is that you need TV, you need radio, to get that viewpoint out there.

Both the people who want to work with media companies because they're newsmakers, and our users want integrated experiences. And our advertisers want integrated experiences. So for us owning that full compliment of media platforms, if you will, is essential. And we feel like we've got a fairly unique combination.

Outside of ESPN and the Weather Channel, we're one of the best-situated media companies in media terms of our cross-platform capabilities. We are inherently digital. We don't have some of the legacy constraints that some of our competitors do. And we have a business model that allows us to be aggressively out there when others are trying to tinker with the access model by putting up paywalls to try and wring more dollars out of their audiences.

We're very happy, and in fact it's supportive of our strategy to be free, maximizing the audience so that we've got that influence.

Do you fear that giving too much away free will hurt the subscription business at all?

We have to negotiate that balance very carefully. But it's not that difficult when you think about what our professional users want versus what the business executive who just needs to know what's going on in their industry and in the economy, or the personal investor who's managing a portfolio of stocks and maybe a few other assets.

What they need is fundamentally different. What's important to the professional user on the Terminal is the speed of news and data. It's critical. And on the website there's a time lag. Then, there's a comprehensiveness in the Terminal that we don't even try to match on the website – it would hurt the user experience because it'd be too complicated. Users want simple, fast, easy. And we provide that with our re-design.

For us, there were a couple big goals: First and foremost, make it a better user experience. We had a fairly old design up. We thought we could greatly improve the performance – in other words, the speed with which pages loaded by upgrading our underlying platforms. We focused on cleaning up the user experience so that it was extremely easy to use. We focused on the scrolling experience – you really get a sense, as a user of the depth and breadth of the content we have, because we have a lot.

And that's only a fraction of what's available to our Terminal customers. But it's highly selected for our audience of business executives and personal investors.

Switching from the old design to the current one – was that a big process?

We strategically wanted to make a departure from the past. The old design we had was deliberately similar to our Terminal's look and feel and user experience.

When you work at Bloomberg, you have a Bloomberg Terminal on your desk. And you have to use it. As somebody who's passionate about the markets, it was like a kid who went to work at the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory.

Same here. I remember my first job, I was an intern for these guys – they had one Bloomberg Terminal for six guys. I would come in early and stay late and just to use it.

It's like a library that never ends. You can't find a dead-end in that thing.

So for us there was a deliberate desire to make a departure from that because it was creating confusion. Who's this for? The perception when we talked to users was – I think Bloomberg has great content, it's a brand that I trust, but I don't know if it's for me. There was that perception and it was really hindering our ability to be more influential and have a broader audience.

Is that mostly what manage? Mostly the website? Do you work on the professional side too?

Bloomberg has a culture of collaboration unlike none other I've ever seen. So very close to and interact a lot with our professional team. But no, I focus entirely on our consumer business.

A lot of our listeners would like to know how you got to where you are now.

I've spent my entire career essentially working on the web. I started my career at McKinsey but even there I was lucky enough to kind of wiggle my way in as a young analyst into our e-commerce practice, which was just getting started, and consulted with a number of Fortune 500 retailers on their e-commerce strategies.

After that I helped start a company with fellow McKinsey and Disney DIS alums. We sold that to a company called LookSmart, Ltd. LOOK in 2000. The company was Zeal.com; before there were terms like wikis and community content and user-generated content, we had created a platform for user-generated content harnessing the zeal, the zealousness, of people around the world to build content in a variety of categories.