Twitter and Bloomberg sign licensing deal increasing Twitter data available in terminals and offering a curated feed of financial tweets
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2015 licensing deal is the quiet first act of what became the deepest media partnership on either side's books: Bloomberg buys Twitter's data for its terminals and builds a curated financial-tweets feed, treating trader chatter as a paid input rather than free noise.
Within two years it escalated into distribution — livestreamed daily shows, then a 24/7 ad-supported live video news channel whose network reportedly secured eight figures of first-year ad revenue before launch. The pattern is clear from the start: Bloomberg pays for access to the conversation, then sells the conversation back as programming.
First-order effects
- Bloomberg terminal subscribers get more Twitter data plus an editorially curated feed of financial tweets, folding real-time market sentiment directly into the trading workflow.
- Twitter converts its firehose into recurring enterprise revenue at exactly the moment its advertising business was still proving itself — a second income stream priced per seat, not per impression.
Second-order effects
- Rival terminal providers face pressure to strike equivalent social-data licenses or explain why their clients trade without the same signal, pushing social feeds toward commodity status inside professional finance tools.
- The revenue logic validated by this deal is what made the later video partnerships rational for both sides: Bloomberg had already demonstrated it would pay for privileged access to Twitter's stream.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platforms stop selling only audience attention to advertisers and start selling the raw conversational signal itself to institutions — the same instinct behind Twitter's later move to have Reuters and the AP supply trusted context across Trends and Search, institutional curation layered over user-generated firehoses.
- Professional information products increasingly bundle licensed social data alongside exchange feeds and newswire text, making platform-to-terminal licensing a standing line item in financial-information economics rather than a one-off experiment.
The trend: Social platforms are evolving from ad-funded broadcast channels into licensed data suppliers, with financial terminals among the first buyers willing to pay for the raw signal.