Henry Blodget Quotes

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.

I care deeply about journalism, but we need to be a business.

I'd like to build a TV company for myself.

When we say a show is successful, it's because, relative to the investment, it's successful, relative to how else we would have spent that money on licensing something else, does this creation - did it attract the audience that it was built for.

At CNN, our view is that good journalism equals good business.

The best businesses that all of us have in the entertainment business are cable content channels, which have a dual revenue stream.

I did 13-something years of talking to wrestlers and promoters about why they did certain things and why they booked matches a certain way and what they were thinking and whether they were satisfied with the draw. And I got a lot of insight in the business.

Here's what I know about the business I am in. It's all based on money. It's all based on ratings.

To be successful, innovation is not just about value creation, but value capture.

Don't turn on monitization, typically, until it's going to be significant.

I think the thing that I wish somebody would ask me is just to ask about the business side of the radio show. I feel like I actually work very hard to make sure the business side of the radio show runs, and no one has any interest in how a public radio show is run. And rightly so.

The goal of a private company is, first, zero to one. Get past the product market fit, figure out whether people actually care about what you're trying to build and someone will pay you money for that. That's the zero to one problem. So scaling, one through N, is figuring out can you do that at scale and how big is the scale. And when people pay you more than what it costs for you to make it, does that equation end up leaving you with money left over, i.e. profits.

Inside an organization there are only cost centers. The only profit center is a customer whose check has not bounced.

It's impossible to overstate how important social media has been to me and the development of my career. The fact that I can go and play venues that hold 25,000 people and sell them out is crazy.I don't have music on the radio. I'm not a pop culture icon. I'm just this kid making dance music. And yet I still can sell out massive arenas. It's truly incredible, and I think a lot of that is because of social media.

I think everybody's goal was to make something that was really broad for a big audience, which was my goal too. But my main goal was that I wanted my audience to love it, because they're the ones who are going to buy it, and they're the ones who are going to tell their friends. And I wanted to make sure that core audience was really happy, because if they all buy it we have a successful movie.

The subscription model of buying music is bankrupt. I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model and it might not be successful.

Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.

National Lampoon lost its audience when it went from monthly magazine to bimonthly to quarterly to annual to just making movies.

Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth.

Deepak Chopra, look at him. He's probably the most successful self-help guru in the world. I don't think he's struggling for any marketing or exposure. You've just got to know where your audience is.

The Indian danced on alone. The crowd clapped up the beat. The Indian danced with a chair. The crowd went crazy. The band faded. The crowd cheered. The Indian held up his hands for silence as if to make a speech. Looking at the band and then the crowd, the Indian said, "Well, what're you waiting for? Let's DANCE.

Of course, a lot of businesses want to reach students, so I funded the magazine by selling advertising. I sold something like $8,000 worth of advertising for the first edition, and that was in 1966. I printed up 50,000 copies, and I didn't even have to charge for them on the newsstand because my costs were already covered.

I think there's a side of me that's trying to compete with Lucas and Spielberg - I don't usually admit this publicly - because I tend to think that they only go so far, and their view of the world is rather simplistic. What I want to do is take whatever cinema is considered normal or successful at a particular time and play around with it - to use it as a way of luring audiences in.

I'm also a big believer of being a scrappy entrepreneur. To be successful you don't have to have all this crazy start-up capital or a ton of knowledge. I think it's actually helpful sometimes to not know all the rules because that way it's easier to break them. And that's why it's so much easier for younger people, I think, to start companies that are challenging more traditional business models than older people. Especially if you're trying to do something good.