Twitter, CBS discuss ad sales tied to Democratic, Republican convention livestreams

Once the second-screen companion to TV, Twitter keeps striking deals to make itself the first screen.

(July 11, 2016), USA Network released the second-season premiere episode of hit show “Mr. Robot” on Twitter (and Facebook and Snapchat and YouTube), three days before the episode airs on TV. Then, on Monday, Twitter announced that CBS News will live-stream its coverage of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions on Twitter.

Twitter will be the only place other than CBS’s TV channel or digital properties to catch the network’s convention coverage, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed. Throughout each day of both conventions, people will be able to check out the broadcast of CBS News’s convention coverage alongside a live feed of convention-related tweets. If you caught Twitter’s Wimbledon-adjacent live stream last week, you should have a good idea of what to expect.

The Twitter spokesperson declined to discuss financial terms of the deal. While the live stream will carry ads aired during CBS’s broadcast — Twitter’s live stream is just a syndication of CBS’s digital broadcast — Twitter will not be making any money from those ads.

But there may be other ads Twitter could profit from. Twitter is talking with CBS about selling ads specifically against the Twitter live stream, but nothing has been finalized, according to the spokesperson. That arrangement would be similar to the one Twitter has struck with the NFL for the league’s Thursday Night Football games that will be syndicated live on Twitter this fall.

About The Author

Tim Peterson

Tim Peterson, Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat’s ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar’s attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon’s ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube’s programming strategy, Facebook’s ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking’s rise; and documented digital video’s biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed’s branded video production process and Snapchat Discover’s ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands’ early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo’s and Google’s search designs and examine the NFL’s YouTube and Facebook video strategies.