M. Scott Havens, global head of digital for Bloomberg Media, made the following comments at SXSW, about its new TicToc network on Twitter:
We saw an opportunity a year ago through our partnership with Twitter to create something new and different. With the rise of fake news, bots and hyper-partisanship that has shaken the world a bit, we felt there was an opportunity to bring trust, objectivity and credibility to the platform.
We see Twitter as the largest real time news network. TicToc, which is about about 2 months old, is built as a native customized news experience for Twitter and for how you use Twitter, broken up into quick bites. It’s live news — not all the time, but when you need it.
It should be there when something is happening in the world and we are staffing up to support it so that it’s truly 24/7 with teams in London, Hong Kong, and New York to start. It’s off to a good start with seven launch sponsors and 155,000 followers as of today. It’s just the beginning for the product. It’s both a great business opportunity and a mission driven opportunity for the next generation of consumers.
We’ve also found that people love breaking news and breaking live events. We’ve done State of the Union, Space X launches etc, and we can see really high concurrency. As we spin up the global infrastructure to do it around the clock and as Twitter’s product evolves, we’d like to do five to six live events at the same time in places like China, Europe and South America.
