TED.com
After joining the TED team in 2005, Cohen soon hired a filmmaker specializing in the Web, Jason Wishnow, and began planning TED's first video podcast. Ever since Chris Anderson had, in 2001, acquired the TED conference -- an elite, expensive, annual event, isolated from the world at large -- he was looking for ways to make the talks available to a wider audience beyond the conference. June Cohen tried to interest TV stations in a TV show consisting largely of TEDTalks, but was told that the lectures lacked mainstream appeal. "When the BBC told me that TED talks were too intellectual for them, I thought it was time to change strategies," In June 2006, a small batch of free videos were posted online, under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons license. By January of the next year, 44 talks had been put online, and they had been viewed 3 million times. Based on that success, TED pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into its video production operations and into the development of a Web site to showcase about 100 of the talks. "Conventional business logic would tell you that in a community like TED you have to keep your commodity scarce and expensive to retain brand value," she said in an interview. "But the same year we started releasing most of our content for free we raised our conference price by nearly 50 percent and still sold out in 12 days."
In 2007, the new TED.com was launched, designed by Method, a design firm based in New York and San Francisco. The website has won numerous awards, including seven Webby Awards, iTunes Best Podcast of the Year (2006-2010), the Communication Arts 2007 Interactive Award for Information Design, the 2008 OMMA award for video sharing, the 2008 Web Visionary Award for technical achievement, the 2008 One Show Interactive Bronze Award, the AIGA Annual Design Competition (2009) and a 2012 Peabody Award. TED.com has been featured in two major design exhibits, at the London Design Museum and the Denver Art Museum. It was named one of the 50 Best Websites of 2010 by Time magazine, and has received praise from various media outlets, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and Design Week. According to announcements made at the TED Conference in February 2010, TEDTalks were watched 250 million times in the first 3½ years they were available. By July 2012, the talks had been viewed more than 800 million times. Some of the talks, like those by Hans Rosling, Ken Robinson and Jill Bolte Taylor have become viral hits. "Putting the talks online free was risky and it turned out really well for us," Cohen has said in an interview. "It turned our audience of 1,000 conference attendees into an audience of 150 million people worldwide."
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