Henry Blodget Quotes

When television came in, everybody thought that was the end of the movie business, which was not and is not.

The definition of strong leadership is not about making decisions that are popular. Making popular decisions is easy - you don't need to be a leader to do that. The definition of strong leadership is to make decisions that are unpopular, but are nevertheless sound.

It's all about who your team is and who your people are.

Arrogance follows distribution strength.

People have been predicting the death of television for 20 years now, and so far it's been entirely wrong. But it does seem viewership habits are starting to change.

In the era of networks only, I cannot tell you the number of shows that we don't know about that did not survive. They got canceled. But there are a few that survived by accident, because they didn't have anything else to do, and they stayed with it.

There's too much bad. The worst is mediocre. Bad is easy. There's high quality, there's pornography, and then there's bad.

Digital advertising is now larger than TV.

Almost any show that has reviewers behind it, Rotten Tomatoes behind it, will find a way to survive.

I think the water cooler is more important than ever. "Oh, did you hear that 'Inside Amy Schumer' is fabulous?" Where do you find it? It's on Netflix, it's on iTunes, it's on places nobody ever heard of five years ago.

My mission is to figure out the journalistic model for the digital medium, finding out how we get the right stories readers want, at the right time and wherever they want to read them.

In the new world of digital, there are no must-read publications any more.

The tech folks have seen WiFi as the way to untether. And what better reason to untether than entertainment content? So there's nobody better positioned than the in-home Wi-Fi purveyor.

You have to have a business model you believe in and like.

Some things go slow, slow, slow, and then - wham! - they're over.

Before the internet, a journalist would write an article about a company that the company felt was unfair and missed a point. All they could do was write a letter to the editor and wait, and maybe a week later it would be printed, or not. Now, they can go to medium.com and immediately publish a long rebuttal, saying the journalist forgot this and did not consider that, the analyst is wrong here. Everybody pulls that immediately into the debate. So it is a much more democratic field for ideas.

The first reaction is, get defensive. Second reaction is, what are we going to do about it?

It's very hard to be good. It is self-destructive thinking to think that there is too much good.

Television is like the movie business. It's not the least-objectionable program - it's the best program that gets positioned. Same in the movie business. It's not just everything automatically gets done by the "in" crowd.

Television is not hurting. Television is in fantastic shape. It's just a golden age for other people.

The content defines the platform, so whereas when I was working at ABC from '66 to '76, people said it was the "great wasteland." It was the least-objectionable program that succeeded. It was, if you could get behind "All in the Family," you were successful.

I'm no expert in vibrators, but I was surprised to learn that one could fit in that little box.

The Financial Times is a wonderful publication, as is the Wall Street Journal and many others. But the new generation is consuming media fundamentally differently. At Business Insider, we have the chance to embrace that whole-heartedly. We do not have a print legacy, digital is not our second business behind a newspaper. It is our only one.

We have more information than ever before, and it is harder to avoid actually seeing what the other side is saying. Yes, we in Business insider focus on publications that we feel speak to us, but that is the same way it was 20 or 100 years ago. In the US, two million people have subscribed to the New York Times and many more millions think it is a terrible, liberal paper they would never read. We can choose to put ourselves in a bubble of only people who agree with us, but in the digital world there are many more ways of saying "Hey, here is something you might want to consider".

Before the internet, big publications were like hydrants in the desert. There were relatively few of them, we needed each one of them tremendously and they had control over what was delivered. Now they are like little streams flowing into a massive ocean.

Fifteen years ago, nobody thought that content would ever work as a business. It was impossible to raise any money, initial investments were $10,000, seldom $100,000. It is only over the last two or three years that we have started to see very large amounts of capital coming into the digital industry. That has created a lot more competition.

When CNN launched in the early 1980s, everybody said: A 24-hour news network won't work. They launched, they did ok, CNN went almost bankrupt because of the risks they had taken, they got bailed out, and 25 years later CNN is a huge global brand. I think the same is going to happen in digital. If you look at the younger generation, there is a huge consumption of digital media and almost no consumption of print or traditional television. Eventually money will follow that. It is just a question of which companies win, how long it takes to get there and what kind of model you need to apply.

Successful publication is all about the mix. What Buzzfeed discovered was that people like cat pictures. We can pretend to be embarrassed about that as a species, but it is actually a truth. So Buzzfeed publishes a lot of cat pictures. But they use the money from cat pictures to build an exceptional newsroom that publishes stories that far fewer people want to read, but it is very important journalism.

Wrapping rubber bands around a watermelon is not journalism. It is entertainment. But the key to success in media has always been a broad mix of serious reporting and entertainment. The New York Times does not make its money on reports about Iraq and Syria. It makes money on its gardening section, food and, yes, stories about cats. "The Today Show" is a very successful program because it is a mix of the celebrity chef and the crazy pet who does the rolls and serious news and interviews.

Everything I have is a private company. And even though a public company's a great thing, it's great for financing and all of the stuff you need to do. I'm not answering to anybody but my wife and my children and the people who work for me, and my partners.

Pornography works to a degree, high quality works, bad is obvious. Nobody goes for bad. The terrible middle ground is the mediocre. That was kind of the essence, in a way, of broadcast television when there were only three channels.

Some people have made a fortune by being employed. Jerry Bruckheimer does not own his content. Warner Bros. owns his shows. They are on CBS, and he makes a fortune.

This sounds crazy, I know, but you can make a billion dollars - very few people do - but you can make a billion dollars on a product. It can be "Lion King," it can be "Simpsons," it can be "Family Guy," who knows what it is. Or you can make zero. But you can't make a billion dollars if you don't own it.

People don't have to go to cable news or network news. Live sports is the one of many things that's kind of community television. There are a lot of people who still tune in to "Sunday Night Football" or "Thursday Night Football" the way they did before.

[T]here's a difference between confident leadership and empty-headed delusion or cheerleading. And this is a difference that many CEOs miss.