Once a disruptor, Twitter now likes old media

Twitter users, including actor Patrick Stewart (R), rings the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) while also celebrating Twitter’s IPO. Getty/ Andrew Burton

On November 7, 2013, Twitter went public. Its shares popped. And new media died.

Over the last year, Twitter has made itself good friends with old media businesses. Its clique of choice is television, the old-line media business that sells tens of billions of dollars in ads a year. For instance, Twitter just said the BBC would distribute short news videos on it about topics that are trending across its network.

The IPO bonanza suggests the strategy is working. Investors are in love with its relationships with big old media companies. For good reason, too. On its own, Twitter isn’t a moneymaker. Millions of people may send out messages across it, but most of them are about as valuable as a shortwave radio broadcast after midnight.

Paperwork filed by Twitter for its initial public offering said the network loses money.

To be fair, the social network has been terrifically clever in its ability to develop and sell new ad formats. Selling TV commercials are comparatively easy — everyone knows what they are. By contrast, most don’t know what a “Promoted Tweet” on Twitter is or what it can do. Selling it — let alone explaining it — is no small task. (It’s a 140-character Tweet that looks like every other message on Twitter, except that it shows up at the top of people’s news feeds for a fee.)

Nevertheless, Twitter has been managed to pull it off. It just hasn’t been able to sell them on a level that makes it profitable. So, investors must be using another metric to value the company. Based on its new media focus, it seems clear they are valuing it by its ability to act as a marketing engine for other media.

To do that, Twitter originally let people publish links to media on other sites. Now, it lets publishers increasingly compress their media to fit inside a small box that sits beneath people’s Tweets.

The network has been supercharging this strategy. In October, it dramatically increased the volume of pictures and videos that appear within people’s Tweets. Overnight, the social network’s news feeds were awash in a multi-media smorgasbord of pictures and video from many different publishers. And that’s just the start.

Twitter just said Vivian Schiller, the New York Times-turned-NPR-turned-NBCUniversal digital media executive, will become its first head of news partnerships in 2014. The traditional media business thinks highly of her. So, it shouldn’t be hard for her to set up all sorts of new deals with it.

In other words, Twitter, the quintessential new media company, is reshaping itself around old media.

Sure, the company is still all digital, full of software engineers, and leading the charge on new media technologies. For instance, it just bought MoPub so it could sell ads slots across the Internet in real time. But MoPub’s real-time bidding technology is already being commoditized. To differentiate it, Twitter will need to plug it into the social data it collects about its users and their media. In other words, its new tech should soon be all about old-style media content.

Now, here’s the kicker. The success of Twitter’s IPO should convince more new media companies to follow its lead by reshaping themselves around old media. After all, the other “Big Five” social networks have already begun the process by forging more links to old media.

In November, Pinterest hired the president of the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper to lead advertiser and media partnerships. In October, Google launched a resource portal for journalists. In September, Facebook launched a set of application programming interfaces for media companies to find hot topics as they arise on its network. And, in April, LinkedIn bought the Pulse news reader to help its users find content from old media that’s relevant to them.

It all boils down to this — to earn their keep, new media companies are starting to align with their parents.

(Disclosure: James Abels runs a start-up working on new ways to design and deliver media.)