Twitter Inc. has grabbed an average of 243,000 viewers to watch the National Football League Match on Thursday.
The social media platform has broadcasted the livestream NFL match between the Buffalo Bills and the New York Jets, which saw the triumph of the latter team with a score of 37-31. The event drew high praise from the Twitter users and the media experts have also reported that this deal of the microblogging company to broadcast livestream NFL games will help the company to maintain its position as one of the best sites to offer live videos.
According to NFL data of Thursday’s game, the Twitter audience of an average of 15.7 million people made only a small fraction of the total viewers who were watching the game across other digital platforms and on television. The sports fans around the world are rejoicing this deal of Twitter with the NFL, as the viewers rely a lot more on the internet to watch live videos than on television at the expense of the satellite connections and the traditional cable.
The social media platform has been struggling off-late with competition for advertising and with the user growth count. However, livestreaming the NFL games might give the company a new direction to attract its users, and simultaneously, it is also trying to catch up with its competitors like Facebook.
The advertisement packages ranged from $1 million to $8 million for all the 10 games. The deal will give Twitter almost 15 in-game local advertisement spots per game, sponsored Periscopes, and before the NFL highlights during the livestreams on Twitter’s live video app. Bank of America Corp, Ford Motor Co, Verizon Communications, and Anheuser-Busch InBev SA were among the companies which ran their video advertisements during the NFL game livestream.
Advertisement Brands and Their Role in the Twitter-NFL Deal
According to a report by the senior vice president of the social media department at Big Spaceship, a digital advertisement agency which is based in Brooklyn, New York, the pact with the NFL has given many brands the potential to reignite their interest in working further with Twitter. It was also mentioned that the ad company still has a big role to play with this deal. Twitter has had a very bumpy ride in the past few months and this livestream of NFL games has come has a boon for the company.
The Vice president of Chili’s Grill and Bar, which is a famous restaurant chain based in Dallas, has said that this deal of Twitter with NFL has given the companies a great opportunity to sponsor their brands via tweets by being a part of the conversation during the games. It was also reported that the companies are intrigued by the ways they can jump in and impressions they can create by being a part of the conversations.
Twitter is the second technology-based social networking company to livestream an NFL game. Yahoo Live had streamed an NFL game in between the Buffalo Bills and the Jacksonville Jaguars that was played last October in London. This match had attracted 2.36 million average viewers against the 243,000 viewers in the Twitter-NFL pact game. According to NFL, almost 15.2 million viewers had watched at least a small part of the game on Yahoo, while a total of only 2.3 million people were tuned to watching the NFL game that was aired on Twitter on Thursday for at least 3 seconds. The Yahoo game was however not broadcasted nationwide on television in the US. In some cases, the stream started playing automatically on the Yahoo websites.