‘With Twitter, we’ll have broader reach’
On Monday, Bloomberg Media joined hands with the $2.53-billion Twitter to create what the duo call a ‘a 24x7 global, live, social and streaming platform’ for news. The unnamed service will launch in late 2017. Bloomberg Media provides news across TV, print, radio, events and online. It has 2,600 journalists and analysts in 70 countries. It is the media arm of privately-held Bloomberg, a global financial information service that derives its revenues and reputation from 325,000 terminals at subscriber locations.
JUSTIN SMITH, chief executive, Bloomberg Media, spoke to Vanita Kohli-Khandekar over phone from New York, on the tie-up. Edited excerpts:
What is the partnership about?
It started six months ago when we got together to stream video over Twitter. This was during the US elections. (Twitter streamed Bloomberg Television’s live broadcast of the US presidential and vice presidential debates. This included Bloomberg Politics programming 30 minutes before and after each
debate). We aired the presidential debates, pinned them on the home page and put them in various places (on Twitter). The numbers were good – two-five million viewers on Twitter without any promotion. About 150 million
users come to Twitter daily for news (Globally, Twitter has 328 million active users a month). We realised it had a potent global footprint. And, we could combine the quality of our content to the speed and breadth of social media to create a new 24x7, over-the-top, free, breaking news service.
How does this work? Is it your content powering a Twitter feed?
Some of it is our content, some of it will be newly created for this platform. So, what we are doing is creating an adjacent operation using our TV resources. Twitter is the leader in breaking news; it is usually 20-30 minutes ahead of traditional media. What we are adding is a layer of verification, editing and global quality-news. This breaking news network will be a global brand in English, to begin with. Then, we could be talking to our local partners for regional and local languages. For example, in India, we have a partnership with Raghav Bahl’s Quint and will be launching Bloomberg-Quint TV. Bloomberg is the owner of the venture (with Twitter). And, we will be jointly accessing the data from Twitter and Bloomberg to develop the product.
Is this only about expanding reach or will it have an impact on the top line, too?
Our existing network is more finance-oriented. Through the Twitter partnership, we will have a broader reach, especially for the broader content. For example on Twitter, the Bloomberg Technology show got about 10 times the reach it does on linear TV. It (the
Bloomberg-Twitter network) will be focused on important news for a global audience. It is an ad supported initiative, we are not looking for subscriptions.
Twitter is struggling to monetise its traffic. So, how do you expect the venture to do in revenue terms?
Twitter is making a transition from text to video. It is smaller than Google and Facebook but it still got over $2 billion in ad revenues. It is a smaller, more niche platform. Given Bloomberg’s reputation for quality, is social media the right way to get more people? The context is of fake news, hatred or a platform that is not credible. From the advertiser’s perspective, there are concerns on social media, the context is different, there is fake news… But, precisely because of this, there is an opportunity if Bloomberg can use credible content to drive traffic on social media. The whole point is simplifying the social media context, filling it with quality information, knowing it is verified.