Los Angeles — As athletes march into London’s Olympic Stadium this Friday, micro-blogging outfit Twitter and NBCUniversal are expected to announce Monday a partnership that will host a page that collects the millions of tweets expected to be sent by athletes, fans, and TV personalities during the Olympic Games as a sort of official narrator for the Summer Olympics in London, according to the Wall Street Journal reports.
Going forward with the partnership, NBC will promote Twitter in broadcasts along with links to athlete interviews or video clips. Twitter hopes to use the Games to prove it can be a sustainable business, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Twitter executives hope the company’s contribution will help it attract a larger audience to its micro-blogging service, which currently has about 140 million monthly users looking for news or current trending topics — putting it third behind LinkedIn’s 150 million and way behind Facebook’s 900 million.Amazingly, from an office in Boulder, Colorado, a limited staff will spend their days sifting through millions of 140-character Tweets (1 million users per character? Interesting) from Olympic athletes, their families, fans and NBC TV personalities onto a single page on Twitter.com.
“This is a way for new users to sample Twitter,” Chloe Sladden, Twitter’s vice president of media, told the Journal.
Executives and investors want the six-year-old service to attract a larger audience and show it can be a serious money-maker. The research firm estimated in January that Twitter would generate $259.9 million in ad revenue this year, but that is still a distant second behind the $5.78 billion in ad revenue Facebook is expected to generate.
Apart from the larger audience that would help Twitter justify its $8.4 billion valuation and clear a path for an IPO. NBC mentioned that no money would be changing hands nor will the network share in Twitter’s ad revenue from its Games website. The partners will cross-promote each other throughout the event that starts Friday and runs through August 12th.
The London Eye Ferris wheel will light up each night based on tweets. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
On the other hand, participating in this mega event are General Electric and Procter & Gamble that are reportedly among the big brands buying ads on Twitter to tout their association with the Olympics but NBCUniversal told the Journal it would not be getting a share of Twitter’s ad revenue. Twitter declined to estimate how much revenue it expects to generate from the Olympics.
“Twitter is positioning itself for strong growth over the next few years,” eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson said in a statement in January. However, “to achieve a trajectory similar to Google and Facebook, Twitter still needs a proven, turn-key ad platform and a significantly bigger user base to deliver the reach advertisers demand.”