This election year has been a pretty interesting one. Now that it’s down to just Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump (Gary Johnson is in there too, with the Libertarian party) with the vote set for November 8th, the two presidential candidates have three debates left before the big day. With the first one coming next Monday. Which will be live streamed on Twitter for free. This comes on the heels of Twitter live streaming Thursday Night Football last Thursday and making it a huge success for them. Twitter has partnered with Bloomberg to live stream all three of the debates leading up to the election day.
Twitter and Bloomberg will be sharing the revenue that is received from ads delivered during the coverage of the debates – this includes both pre-debate and post-debate coverage as well. Twitter will also be live streaming the vice presidential debate, and all of the debates will be in the same format as the Thursday Night Football game from last week. Making it easy for users to watch the debate from Twitter, and not even need to use their TV or cable box. A great thing for cord-cutters that are interested in the debate, before casting their vote in November.
Bloomberg will also be streaming the same coverage on their website, as well as their apps that are available on just about every platform imaginable. So Twitter isn’t getting exclusive rights to this coverage. Leading many to wonder how useful this coverage would be in generating user growth, but also getting their users to use the platform a bit longer than usual. It’s a step in the right direction, and we’ll find out more after the first debate takes place next week.
Facebook will also be live streaming the debates this year. They announced a deal with ABC to live stream their coverage of all three debates. So those that are on Facebook – arguably a larger number of people than those on Twitter – are able to watch the debate there without needing to login to their cable provider or anything like that. What will be interesting here is to see the number of users tuning in on Twitter and Facebook versus those on the typical TV networks like ABC and CNN.