In 1984, Richard Saul Wurman founded TED as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged. Nowadays, the concept covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages.

When Director of TED Media, June Cohen, shopped around the idea for a television show featuring lectures from the organization's famously elite conference, she was told the talks didn't have mainstream appeal. BBC told her that TED talks were too intellectual for them. Therefore, Instead of television, TED ended up putting the TED talks online.

Cohen thought the presentations would mostly appeal to a small, geeky audience, but their impact has been much wider. TED's video website, which broadcasts lectures online for free, celebrated its eighth-year anniversary. Since posting its first video, the site has collected about 500 million total video views, 1 million Facebook followers, and 1 million iPad app downloads.

Sure, none of the 1,000 videos have been viewed as many times as "Friday," but they've been more successful than anyone at TED imagined they would be.

"Those numbers are really somewhat surprising, given the length of the videos, which is 18 minutes, and also the content," Cohen says. "TED talks cover some majorly esoteric topics: Molecular biology, development policy, quantum physics, philosophy, poetry. ... I think TED talks are proof that engaging, smart free video content can go viral no matter how long it is."

Releasing the talks online for free has changed TED's culture from one of closed, exclusive content to a platform for spreading ideas.

About 20 of the organization's 50 employees now work with web, video and media, along with 7,000 volunteers from around the world translating TED talks into 81 languages. As a result, the majority of video views come from outside the United States. The organization launched a Q&A platform in February to encourage discussion around the videos.

On Monday, TED will release its first TED talk online that is not in English. The talk was recorded in Mexico at a TEDx event and will be broadcast in Spanish with English Subtitles.

The next step for TED, Cohen says, will be finding a better way to reach developing countries.

"There’s a real hunger in the world for meaning, for knowledge, for inspiration," she says.

 

As of April 2014, over 1,700 talks are available free online. By January 2009 they had been viewed 50 million times. In June 2011, the viewing figure stood at more than 500 million, and on Tuesday, November 13, 2012, TED Talks had been watched one billion times worldwide. Most recent metrics show that TED Talks are being viewed at a rate of 1.5 million times a day — which means that a new viewing commences 17 times a second.

Since posting its first video, the site has collected 5 million Facebook followers and between 5 and 10 million app downloads (on Google Play).

Many studies were conducted on how TED talks impact on society and many bloggers, researchers and bloggers challenged the accuracy and speakers selection of the talks.

Studies provided analyses of criteria as the gender of the speakers, their academic age, their academic affiliation, their online visibility, their academic characteristics and what they call “citation impact” which asks if a TED talk has an impact on the presenters’ citation impact.

 

 

How it is innovative?

Learning through videos became very popular since the launching of video-sharing websites and video hosting services, which are more than 60 nowadays. The most popular are Youtube and Dailymotion according to their number of unique monthly visitors (eBizMBA Rank).

The particularity of TED talks is that they have an unique format: around 20 minutes talk on a specific subject with a speaker; expert of the subject or celebrity. The talks emphasize the sharing of experience and knowledge, using the storytelling as the key manner to deliver the message.

 

 

Why is it so successful?

The main difference between a TED talk and a lecture is that the presenter/speaker wears a hat as coach and not as a professor or expert and is mainly sharing a personal or professional experience and giving his/her feedback and expressing his/her experience about it.

Nevertheless, the talks remain a basic way to learn new things, explore unknown topics, get inspired by successful people in multiple disciplines but without directly interacting with interveners.