The Death of the TED Talk
The decisions by TED that destroyed its brand
The TED Talk is a staple of Internet culture, but its prevalence has been in decline. In the last 2 years, only about 3 TED Talks have received more than 5 million views. Sorting the TED Talk YouTube channel to show the most-viewed videos at the top reveals that nearly every video was posted 6 or more years ago, and half or more were posted over 10 years ago. This decline reveals a slow death of the TED Talk. My first instinct in researching this decline was to assume that TED Talks had simply run through their cultural relevance. What I discovered showed that a series of decisions by the TED organization itself was likely a large factor in the decline, and that the decline may have been prevented or slowed if the organization had made better business decisions.
The TED organization dates back to 1984; the first conference included demonstrations of CDs and e-books, however, the famous TED Talks were absent at this event. It wasn’t until 2006 that TED would begin to produce TED Talks, which they uploaded to YouTube. This series of videos became extremely popular shortly after their initial launch, leading TED to redesign their website to focus more on these talks. Today, most are probably unaware that TED produces (or ever produced) any content other than speeches, as the TED Talk series has slowly overtaken the brand recognition of the entire TED organization.
The TED organization originally vetted TED Talks and only hosted a handful of people who could produce the speeches that were the most worth listening to. That was until TEDx was created in 2009. TEDx allowed local organizations and everyday people to host TED Talk events, decentralizing the branding associated with TED Talks. This decision was meant to allow a greater number of speakers than the TED organization could dream of being able to afford to accommodate on its own. The main TED YouTube channel features about 4,850 videos, about 277 TED Talks per year on average, a bit more than one TED Talk for every weekday. The TEDx YouTube channel, however, has an unfathomable 223,400 videos. That’s an average of 14,900 TEDx Talks every year, or about 41 TEDx Talks every day. There is no way TED alone could have coordinated that number of speeches and events on their own. However, TEDx would come with major caveats.
With this explosion in the volume of TED Talks produced, the idea that they were forums largely for “ideas worth sharing” began to slowly degrade. Even on the main TED YouTube channel, many pseudo-scientific speakers have slipped through the cracks, such as Paul Zak’s talk about Oxytocin and Amy Cuddy’s talk about the power pose. Much to their detriment, these videos have never been deleted from YouTube, despite the controversies surrounding them.1 The less rigorous standards of a TEDx Talk can allow far more pseudo-scientific claims and speeches designed for personal promotion to slip through the cracks.2
Opening up speeches to nearly anyone who wants to give one significantly lowered the quality of TED Talks. To put it simply: There aren’t 223,400 “ideas worth sharing.” TED made clear to the TEDx community that keeping the speeches of high quality was the burden of the independent TEDx organizers, not the TED organization’s. This statement by TED came after one of the most infamous TEDx speeches ever made, in which speaker Randy Powell claimed to have discovered “vortex based mathematics” that would cure all diseases and produce free energy. Stanford Professor Jay Wacker called the speech “such fucking bullshit” on Quora. TEDx eventually removed the video from YouTube, but 2 months later the TEDxValenciaWomen event had speeches on “pseudoscience topics like ‘plasmatics,’ crystal healing, and Egyptian psychoaromatherapy.” These incidents have lowered audience expectations for the quality of content they receive from TED Talks.
Esther Snippe has noted several examples of “banned TED Talks” like these.3 These are talks that were either never published or were later deleted from the TEDx YouTube channel. In addition to the previously noted “vortex-based math” video, she notes other videos that were pulled for a variety of reasons. Some were pulled for pseudoscience, promoting illicit drug use, politics, and the usage of a slur for a joke. All three promoting junk science were from TEDx events. One suggested that DMT connected us to higher beings, and the other suggested that science is flawed because it presumes telepathy is impossible.
Others have also pointed out that TED Talks are often formulaic and over-rehearsed. This might have been tolerable in the beginning, but as more speakers slowly herd towards the same style of speech, the similarities become more noticeable (and is accelerated by the publication of over 200,000 of them). Julie Bindel writing for The Guardian described this ire well:
Many of the speakers state the blatantly obvious on a loop, sounding as though they have discovered the theory of relativity all over again. The pretentious gestures, rehearsed pauses and speech traits single them out from other public speakers. They appear to have learned the art of making the simplest ideas appear complex.
The TED Talk format becomes repetitive and uninteresting after the first several speeches a person is the audience to. The satirical news website The Onion even parodied how cookie-cutter the formatting can be: exaggerated pauses and over-complicating incredibly simple topics. As these speeches become more common, they become less interesting, less original, and less worth listening to.
TED speakers are also not compensated for their speeches. Most TED Talk speakers provide their talks for altruistic reasons and a genuine desire to spread knowledge, but many others view the TED Talk stage as a free soapbox for self-promotion and aggrandizement. If TED did pay speakers, it would be in a better negotiation position to require speakers to avoid self-promotional content in their speeches and to adhere strictly to scientific facts (or be clear about the line between fact and speculation). That TEDx organizers don’t pay their speakers also means they have less incentive to vet their speakers and speeches for quality, allowing them instead to focus solely on quantity.
The expansion into TEDx appears to be a contributor to the erosion of interest in TED Talks, or at least a major factor. However, TED could have expanded in other ways that didn’t involve giving up much of its content control power. For example, TED-Ed is another YouTube channel with videos that attract millions of viewers. The videos are animated and usually provide a crash course or brief history of a topic. The videos are high-quality and lack the common self-aggrandizement and over-confidence in many TED Talks, mostly by using the same narrators across videos. The videos even include supplemental educational materials, allowing educators to build on the work with lesson plans and questions. TED could have chosen to do something similar for TED Talks, providing more than a stage and an audience for speakers.
Another culprit in the downfall of TED Talks, as suggested by Charles Euchner, is podcasts. Podcasts can be of higher quality than TED Talks. The people that produce them can discuss topics in-depth, sometimes for an hour or more, even if they are significantly less reliable than even TEDx Talks. Both The Joe Rogan Experience and Call Her Daddy hosted major party presidential candidates during the 2024 election, showing just how influential podcasts can be. This also shows a place these podcasts have an advantage: the ability to discuss topics of immediate importance.
TED has experimented with podcasts in the past, but TED stopped producing them in mid-2020. In the TED Audio Collective, Chris Anderson, the head of TED, would interview previous TED Talk speakers. Right away, there are several issues with this formatting. Why not interview people who haven’t given a TED Talk about topics they have expertise in, a bit like NPR does? Even more importantly: Why does it have to be Chris Anderson who interviews? Why not expand by having a variety of interviewers, each familiar with a different set of topics? Instead of killing the TED Audio Collective, it would have been wise to consider how it could have been expanded. TED would have also been able to maintain its power of content control by vetting various interviewers, who would have been able to probe interviewees in real-time.
TED’s own decisions have been the main contributor to the erosion of the popularity of the TED Talk. There were opportunities for expansion that didn’t involve giving up central quality control, yet TED chose a route that allowed pseudo-scientific and self-aggrandizing speeches to proliferate. The sheer volume of content created by the decision to start the TEDx brand has also disrupted public perception of TED Talks by allowing speeches with repetitive themes and styles to be posted at an unwatchable volume. As the number of TED Talks has increased, the number of people watching them has decreased. TED decided to put quantity over quality, and that decision backfired.
The findings of the original power pose study could not be reproduced in subsequent scientific studies.
It should be noted that TEDx stipulates that independent organizers not include pseudoscientific speeches or speeches with a commercial agenda.
Snippe’s article, which I discovered after writing most of this piece, covered many of the points I had already made.