The Guardian: Twitter pegging revenue hopes on $10bn live video market

Posted July 28, 2016

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The Internet was made for video.  At least that's what advertisers believe.  Twitter is hoping that video, particularly live video, can be a revenue stream to help the embattled social media network.

Twitter has been marred of late with poor revenue and growth numbers, but its recent push into video is hoping to turn those numbers around.  You may remember earlier this year when Twitter aquired the streaming rights to NFL games, and this is indicative of where Twitter is going in the future -- and the web more broadly.

Live video and streaming has radically changed broadcasting. We've said it almost a million times but only a few years ago it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to broadcast live video to the world, now you can do it for practically nothing.

Jemima Kiss from The Guardian has the story:

Twitter is battling for a share of the internet’s booming video advertising budgets, its executives said on Tuesday, as the company reported its slowest growth in quarterly revenue since going public in 2013.

Facing increasing competition from fast-growing competitors such as Snapchat and Instagram, Twitter is attempting to encourage users to stay longer on the platform by adding more live video content from Periscope and on Twitter itself.

It has signed 250 media partners across politics, sports and entertainment, introducing ways to watch live video and simultaneously comment including live broadcasts of the Republican and Democratic party conventions in July.

“We’re working every day to make Twitter faster and more intuitive to use,” said its CEO, Jack Dorsey, “introducing changes to the timeline, character count and reply rules. We have exciting momentum on live video on Periscope and on Twitter.”

Adam Bain, Twitter’s chief operating officer, said that video now accounts for the majority of Twitter’s advertising revenue. “One year ago those products [Twitter’s video advertising offering] did not exist,” he said. “There’s a whole new set of video budgets out there – a $10bn marketplace in the US alone.”

Bain said there had been strong demand for advertising around its NFL content, including the brands Sony, Nestlé, Verizon and Anheuser-Busch.

Read the full report here.