Twitter first live broadcast of a National Football League (NFL) “Thursday Night” game reached 2.3 million users globally, the NFL said onFriday. The game, New York Jets vs. Buffalo Bills, marked the first time Twitter sold ads for live sports video.
The average audience size watching the game between the New York Jets and Buffalo Bills on Twitter was 243,000 people with an average watch time of 22 minutes per viewer, the NFL said. By comparison, 15.4 million people watched the game on CBS CBS -0.86% and NFL Networks on television on an average minute basis. A total of 48.1 million people watched at least one minute of the game on television, and 2.4 million watched the game on at least one digital property, such as Twitter, NFL mobile from Verizon and digital CBS platforms, the NFL said.
Twitter is hoping that its deal with the NFL to live stream 10 “Thursday Night” games will help the company boost its declining revenue growth. Twitter paid $10 million for the deal in April. Viewers could stream the game via Twitter on Twitter’s mobile app, website, Apple AAPL -0.64% TV, Amazon Fire TV and Microsoft’s Xbox One.
“It was exciting to see how the experience played out on Twitter with how fans reacted to the first [Thursday night] football live stream,” a Twitter spokesman said on Friday.
Ad packages for all 10 games reportedly range from $1 million to $8 million. The deal gives Twitter about 15 in-game local ad spots per game, ads before NFL highlights and sponsored Periscopes, streams on Twitter’s live video app. Some advertisers in the deal so far include Sony, Nestlé SA and Anheuser-Busch InBev. Yahoo paid the NFL about $20 million for the
rights to one game last October, but is believed to have lost money on the deal.
Twitter cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey has repeatedly described “live” as Twitter’s core strength. How Twitter fares with viewers and advertisers over the course of the broadcasts will test its value to advertisers as a live events platform, particularly as competition mounts among social networks like Facebook and Snapchat to capture marketer’s video ad budgets. Twitter started offering video ads in users feeds last year and has been offering pre-roll video ads for several years.
Engagement with the live stream will also offer insight into how ready (or not) consumers are to watch long games and shows on five-inch smartphone screens, and if Twitter can appeal in new ways to users who may have earlier shied away from the service.
“We’re focused now on what Twitter does best: Live,” Dorsey said in February. “We believe we can become the first screen for everything that’s happening now.”
Twitter reported its smallest year-over-year revenue gain in the second quarter, which was also its eighth consecutive quarter of declining revenue growth. In addition, Twitter’s user growth has stalled, and the stock has fallen about 17% this year. Speculation persists that Twitter could be an acquisition target. Twitter has been critiqued by analysts and investors for not being easy enough to use across mass audiences and for not evolving the product swiftly enough. Twitter has about 313 million monthly users, Facebook has 1.7 billion monthly users and Snapchat reportedly has 150 million daily active users.
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