Bloomberg monetizes readers coming from social media

Lucia Moses of Digiday examines how Bloomberg makes money from readers who come to its stories via social media.

Moses writes, “Bloomberg.com’s social side door traffic has grown 90 percent over the past year, according to the company, no doubt helped by the fact that Bloomberg owns the Twitter handles @business, @luxury, @markets and @technology. According to SimilarWeb, 17.1 percent of Bloomberg’s desktop traffic comes from social sources (a figure that’s likely higher on mobile), led by Facebook, reddit and Twitter. The company has become the latest to introduce a product, called Social Connect 2.0, that lets marketers serve ads to those visitors when they come to the site from social channels.

“‘There are definitely marketers that love that highly social audience,’ said Paul Caine, Bloomberg Media’s chief revenue and client partnerships officer. ‘Social Connect 2.0 is based on the understanding that each social platform has a unique type of consumer who is seeking content but often for different reasons. The goal of this product is to better understand those nuances and to help our partners market and tell the story more seamlessly via those channels.’

“The increase in Bloomberg’s social audience mirrors a shift in news consumption at large. According to the Pew Research Center, more people are getting their news via Facebook and Twitter. One in 10 people get their news on Twitter, while on Facebook, it’s four in 10.”

Read more here.