As another weak quarterly earnings report sends Twitter’s stock plunging, the company is attempting to assuage investor fears by playing up its 24/7 sports coverage as a last-ditch effort to grow its user base following the loss of Thursday Night Football to Amazon.
Twitter reported 328 million monthly active users for the second quarter, flat from the first quarter, amid an ongoing struggle to attract and retain users. This has been a major problem for the social media company, especially as its behemoth rival, Facebook, grows exponentially. Facebook announced this week that its user base surpassed 2 billion.
On a call with analysts following the earnings report, Twitter Chief Operating Officer Anthony Noto played up the company’s recent efforts to launch a 24/7 sports channel called Stadium, which is a joint venture between Sinclair Broadcast Group, Silver Chalice and 120 Sports.
Twitter Q2 2017 earnings show a disturbing trend. No MAU growth month-over-month and a slight dip in the U.S. Trump effect? pic.twitter.com/4gFlDFqywy
— Lance Ulanoff (@LanceUlanoff) July 27, 2017
Twitter is betting the increase in live programming will negate the effects of losing the NFL Thursday Night Football streaming deal to Amazon for the 2017 season. It’s currently testing Stadium with plans to launch this fall with the start of the NFL season, said Noto.
“We do have tougher comparable live advertising comps in the back half of the year. The NFL was part of that,” said Noto. “We’ve talked about the fact that while we don’t have Thursday Night Live Football on the platform, we do have live news and analysis and highlights of NFL programming throughout the season and we’re going into the fourth quarter this year with 1,200 hours in this quarter and we’ll add to that.”
The loss of Thursday Night Football and the launch of Stadium will usher in a new era of streaming at Twitter where there is a downplayed focus on major league live sports streaming and more of a focus on live and taped videos offering highlights and analysis. Currently, the only major league using Twitter to stream select games is the MLB, and that’s not exclusive. The NHL had games streamed on Twitter this past season.
While it lost the games, Twitter extended its four-year relationship with the NFL through Amplify, which will enable the two to collaborate on programming created specifically for the Twitter platform, from live pregame video to on-demand highlights, that will air around the same time as Thursday, Sunday and Monday night NFL games.
Last quarter, Twitter reached 1,200 hours of live premium video hours, an increase from 600 hours in the quarter prior. That helped to grow unique viewers to 55 million, a 22% year-over-year increase, with video content directly correlating with an increase in event engagement on Twitter, compared with events that did not have video, according to Noto.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the doubling in streaming hours on the platform in the most recent quarter is a testament to the “value proposition” Twitter can deliver.
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In Twitter’s concert-streaming deal with Live Nation, for example, the number of tweets increased 70 percent when there was video of a concert compared when there was no video. The number of authors increased 50 percent and the number of tweets seen increased 4.5-fold. Noto said Twitter saw “similar trends” when it had the Thursday Night Football deal.
Twitter will also create content for smaller leagues in hopes the platform becomes a place for passionate subgroups, which might have otherwise struggled to drive real engagement, to consume and share content. Some of its most recent deals include the WNBA, Women’s National Hockey League and Canadian Football League.
Twitter’s value, said Noto, won’t be driven by headline content or premium content alone, but also by serving these underserved passionate audiences, which includes esports.
“We’ve gone head to head with a number of our competitors with the same exact content streaming at the same exact time, and we’ve been able to beat our competitors whether it’s in sports, whether it’s in news and politics, whether it’s in esports because we have a different audience that’s highly engaged with this content already and has an interest in it,” Dorsey said.