Why Sam Altman Spent $100M on 10,000 Viewers

**Colin** (0:00)
Two weeks ago, I woke up to a text from a friend. It was a Wall Street Journal article that read, OpenAI buys tech talk show TPBN.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:09)
We have some huge news. This is from the OpenAI blog. OpenAI acquires TBPN, accelerating the global conversation about AI. TBPN's not going away.
We're gonna be live every day, three hours, as long as we want.

**Samir** (0:23)
Wait, wait, what?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:25)
OpenAI bought TBPN?

**Colin** (0:27)
So OpenAI just dropped hundreds of millions of dollars by a tech podcast.

**Samir** (0:30)
And Sam Altman now officially owns TBPN.

**Colin** (0:32)
Congratulations, Sam, you're now in media business. You acquired TBPN, the very hot tech online show and media company.

**Samir** (0:40)
What turned your head?

**Sam Altman** (0:42)
I think those guys do the best and most interesting job of covering what's happening with AI in a way that people understand, you know, they are genius marketers, and I would love to have better marketing.

**Colin** (0:55)
So if you haven't heard of TBPN, it's a daily live stream podcast all about technology and business. There's about 7,000 to 10,000 people who watch the show every day, but it's reported that OpenAI paid upwards of $100 million for the show.

**Samir** (1:09)
Not to mention it only started 16 months ago.

**Colin** (1:12)
So at the surface level, this headline and article may not make sense to you, but actually, I think it makes a lot of sense, and I think it signals where the future of the media industry is going. All right, OpenAI buying a Twitter live streamed podcast. We're going to get into it.
Okay, so it's been about two weeks since we saw this headline. OpenAI buys tech talk show TPBN.

**Samir** (1:43)
I thought it was April Fools, but it turned out it was April 2nd.

**Colin** (1:47)
It was April 2nd. It was in the Wall Street Journal. I had to double take, but yeah, it's a crazy headline in our industry.

**Samir** (1:55)
Yeah, I mean, if you don't understand the role that TBPN plays in the tech world, how fast they rose, but you decide to go check out their viewership, the headline makes almost no sense.

**Colin** (2:08)
In terms of the size and scale of TBBN, they have 60,000 YouTube subscribers, about 300,000 followers on Twitter. They stream every single day. So they're essentially a sport center for the technology and business world. But the amount of people who watch it live is pretty, or is considered relatively small. So it's anywhere around like seven to 10,000 people watch the show live across all platforms.
They, in real time, because they're producing live, are generating clips of their interviews and takes and news that are going out across every platform. And Scott Galloway did this analysis of their media output and showed that, yes, the live is being viewed by seven to 10,000 people in a session over the three hours they're live every day.
But the clips have an average viewership of 200,000 views. And these are clips of them talking to Mark Zuckerberg, them talking to Mark Cuban, they talk to Travis Kalanick from Uber. So these are very notable people in tech that go out, and the clips end up generating the traction of the audience.

**Samir** (3:19)
Yeah. To paint you a picture of the show, it is support center for the LinkedIn business crowd. But even just visually, if you're to watch TPBN, if you have not before, they call it neo-trad media. So neo-traditionalist media, meaning when you watch TPBN, it looks like traditional media. It looks like something that could be on TV. It looks like CNBC.
But if you actually sit for a second watch, it very much fits into the wave of New World media in that they are streaming live, chat is pulled up. It is a much looser, made for the Internet show that looks like television.

**Colin** (3:56)
So we spent time with these guys about three months ago.
Importantly here, this show has been around for 16 months.
To go from not a show to a hundred million plus dollar outcome in 16 months is pretty crazy. It's unlike something we've seen before. And that number is only similar to the Joe Rogan deal we saw, or those mega Spotify deals we saw.
So it's pretty unique. Now, the question that a lot of people are asking too is, like, wait, why would OpenAI want an editorial platform, or why would they want like a news show? So just to go inside, you know, the actual deal, TPBN has built this 11 person media company. So pretty small from a media company perspective. In their first year, they generated about $5 million in ad revenue. And then when we spoke with them, they were talking about how their sponsorships were trading at a million dollars each. They didn't fully confirm it, but they kind of alluded to it on our show. And they had 20 sponsors already locked in by December of last year. So when we walked out of their studio, we were like, oh my gosh, this is a $20 million ad business. And by the time they actually sold OpenAI, it was projected that they were going to make $30 million in 2026 And the way they did their advertising was very different because they're live, they had sponsors on the screen the entire time.