There was a lot of news in the digital media space coming out of New York City this week, as advertisers and the press trooped across Manhattan during NewFronts, an annual two-week rite of spring for presentations by major media companies, including Hulu, Hearst, and Time, Inc. But the buzz that was created in back-to-back presentations on Monday dominated much of the discussion as Bloomberg and Twitter announced the creation of the first-ever 24/7 breaking news online video network that is being called “Bloomberg Ticktock.” The network will stream exclusively on Twitter.
Bloomberg will curate the content
“Ticktock,” which launches in the fall, will feature citizen-generated breaking news video that will be verified by Bloomberg editors and supplemented with reports from the company’s own credentialed business journalists. “We are doing this because people were using Twitter to share not only what was going on with them but what was in front of them,” explained Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey during an appearance on Monday with Michael Bloomberg in New York. “We want to be the first place that people hear about what matters.”
For Bloomberg, the partnership represents an opportunity to significantly broaden a cross-platform audience of 62 million users, while Twitter recently reported 328 million active participants.
Bloomberg himself is worried that the ever-shifting digital news landscape could undercut the franchise he’s built successfully since 1981. “There are people nipping at our heels,” said Bloomberg on Monday. “Someone is going to come along and disrupt us, hopefully not soon.”
The joint appearance in New York of two men who represent the early days of digital media delivery and the medium’s potential future, did not escape either executive.
“I could be his grandfather,” said Bloomberg, drawing chuckles from the assembled advertisers and press at his company headquarters. “We both have a deep obsession with data,” said Dorsey.
In addition to the Bloomberg partnership, Twitter also announced nearly a dozen new live content streams, half of which will be sports-oriented.
These include the PGA, Major League Baseball, and women’s pro basketball (WNBA).
Early investor criticizes Twitter
However, Chris Sacca, who was an early Twitter investor and saw the company through its heady days of growth, was not as enthusiastic about the company’s news. Speaking on Tuesday at the Collision conference in New Orleans, Sacca said that he had sold all of his Twitter shares and expressed frustration that their video platform will likely continue to struggle even with Bloomberg behind it. “They have all the world’s best content and they do the worst job in the world of actually showing that to you,” said Sacca.
Platform issues aside, Twitter also faces a landscape that has become highly competitive and fraught with concern, following charges of “fake news” and the posting of highly disturbing content.
Facebook, whose “Live” channel has grown exponentially in recent months, has been forced to address these issues head on with the recent announcement that they will hire 3000 content monitors to police submissions.
The other factor in play is money. Twitter has struggled to become profitable and there are huge dollars in digital ad spending ($72 billion), but also rising concerns about how to spend them. A lot of advertisers sat up and took notice when the New York Times published a story several weeks ago about what happened when Chase tried an experiment and cut their digital ads from running on 400,000 websites to only 5,000. The click-through results were the same.
“Putting the two companies together will create something that will be good for the world,” said Bloomberg at one point during his NewFronts appearance this week in New York. Whether it will also be good for Twitter remains the key question of this year in the world of online media.
