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Twitter's (TWTR) Biggest Cash Cow Could Be in TV

October 7, 2013 9:09 AM EDT
With Twitter (Nasdaq: TWTR)(NYSE: TWTR) filing for an IPO last week, the Street was all abuzz about growth opportunities for the social media giant.

One might be in TV. Research firm Nielsen (NYSE: NLSN) said that there is a large disconnect between what are considered the most-popular shows on TV versus what generates the most buzz on the social media site.

This could mean greater advertising opportunities for Twitter. The company's audience is a younger, generally more city-centric crowd, which is vastly different than the overall TV-watching U.S. audience. Twitter has an advantage here because users are more engaged than those that simply watching programs and that ad dollars might be better spent as users are more likely to view them.

Twitter currently runs a program called Amplify, which allows advertisers to attach short video clips along with message posts. There is another program which allows that companies to target Twitter users which spot ads on TV.

One example given was for the series finale of AMC's (Nasdaq: AMCX) Breaking Bad, which was number one on Twitter ahead of its September 23rd broadcast with 9.3 million unique Twitter users seeing related posts. The show was number six in the key 18- to 49-year-old TV viewing demographic.

While Breaking Bad was a good example of a show that bridge the social media gap, Nielsen noted that, out of the top 10 TV shows for the week-ending September 23rd, none were in the top 10 TV rankings for Twitter posts.

With today's report, Nielsen said that TV viewers also posting messaged on Twitter was about 19 million in Q2 this year, up 24 percent over the same period in 2012.

Despite Twitter users potentially being considered higher quality users for programming, it wasn't made clear whether or not the company charges a higher premium for advertising.


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