Twitter’s first Thursday Night Football live stream reaches 2.3 million viewers
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Twitter has live streamed its first Thursday Night Football game as part of its 10-game package with the NFL. For industry executives and a majority of fans, it was a success. Viewership numbers rolled in Friday and told a similar story.
According to the NFL, 2.3 million viewers watched the Buffalo Bills-New York Jets game and/or the pregame show for a minimum of three seconds with video being 100% in view, which is on par with Yahoo’s stream last season of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Bills in London.
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The game alone reached 2.1 million viewers on Twitter while the average audience on was 243,000 with each viewer watching an average of 22 minutes of the game. Average minute audience is determined by the average numbers of viewers per minute during the game.
Between CBS and NFL Network, where the game was aired on traditional television, an average of 15.4 million viewers saw the game.
In a recent 2016 Q2 earnings conference call, Twitter’s Chief Financial Officer, Anthony Noto indicated the company could potentially see a revenue uptick later this fall with three games in October, one in November and four in December. On Friday, Twitter stock was up about four percent following the live stream.
“I would note that the NFL live streaming deal, while we’re really excited about it and we’ve achieved some success in the marketplace on the advertising business, we will only have two games in September, so two games in the entire quarter. And so the impact of that will be proportional to the total number of games that we have,” Noto said.
The next Twitter live stream of Thursday Night Football will be the Houston Texans at the New England Patriots on Sept. 22.
