Dive Brief:
- Last year, Twitter beat out Verizon and Amazon for the rights to live stream 10 NFL Thursday Night Football games, bringing the social media site's strategy pivot toward video into focus. This year, Amazon is back in the bidding process but will also be joined by powerhouses Facebook and YouTube in competing with Twitter, according to a report in Recode.
- Twitter paid $10 million last year for the NFL rights — a fraction of the cost of TV rights and also reportedly a smaller bid than either Verizon or Amazon's but one the NFL welcomed due to Twitter's social media reach.
- Although Twitter claimed a 3.5 million viewer average for each game stream last season, when applying TV's metric of average audience at any given time, that figure dropped to a couple of hundred thousand views per game, Recode said. CBS averaged closer to 15 million viewers on linear TV for the same games.
Dive Insight:
Twitter was early to ink streaming deals, especially in the sports arena, but the explosive growth in popularity of live video in the time since might mean the platform is losing its foothold. Platforms like YouTube and Facebook significantly beat out Twitter for sheer audience reach, potentially connecting with billions of users instead of Twitter's couple of hundred million.
For the NFL and for broadcasters who are chasing cable cord-cutters, that difference in user base will likely make a huge difference. The NFL is expected to make a decision within the next month.
Twitter COO Anthony Noto recently suggested the platform will double down on live video offerings this year, and will specifically focus on "underserved pieces of content" in areas that don't necessarily get a lot of broadcast attention like e-sports or lacrosse. NFL games, one of the last bastions of destination viewing for traditional TV, are hardly "underserved," suggesting that Twitter might be well aware that it doesn't have a strong argument for retaining the sports organization's media rights.
Twitter has attempted to make its video advertising framework more akin to that of TV. The embattled platform recently teamed with Dentsu Aegis Network to offer a limited group of advertisers a guaranteed video ad product similar to TV spots.