Twitter signs deal with Bloomberg to livestream three of its daily shows, will share revenue on ads sold alongside videos
Twitter has been ramping up its commitment to streaming live video fairly rapidly over the past week or so, rolling out an experiment from the Wimbledon tennis tournament followed …
Context & Ripple Effects
Days after testing live video with the Wimbledon stream, Twitter is moving from one-off events to scheduled programming: Bloomberg will put three of its daily shows on the platform, with the two companies splitting ad revenue sold against the videos. It is Twitter's first standing content commitment rather than an experiment.
The template held. Within months Twitter extended the same rev-share structure to Bloomberg's presidential debate coverage, and by spring 2017 the partnership had grown into a 24/7 ad-supported Bloomberg news channel alongside a roster of sixteen streaming partners.
First-order effects
- Bloomberg gains a distribution surface for three daily shows at no production cost to Twitter, while Twitter converts its timeline audience into sellable video inventory under a shared ad-revenue model.
Second-order effects
- Other publishers face pressure to accept similar rev-share terms to stay visible on Twitter's Live page — BuzzFeed, Viacom, MLBAM and others subsequently signed on as streaming partners, standardizing the split-revenue deal shape.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Twitter's business shifts from pure timeline advertising toward being a live-video platform where media companies rent reach and Twitter takes a cut — making exclusive-content economics, not just ads, central to its revenue base.
The trend: Social platforms are becoming ad-revenue-sharing distributors of publishers' live video, with Twitter's Bloomberg deal as an early template that scaled into a 24/7 news channel.