Twitter may have just scored its biggest win yet.
The social media platform has signed a partnership with Univision and Fox Sports in which both networks will deliver video clips from the Copa America soccer tournament, one of the largest sporting events in the world, onto Twitter, reports the Wall Street Journal. This deal has been touted as Twitter's largest video distribution and ad deal to date.
The clips and ads will run through the Twitter Amplify partnership program, which lets publishers post videos on Twitter with six-second pre-roll ads on those videos. The revenue is then shared between publishers and Twitter, with an estimated 70/30 split, according to TechCrunch.
Twitter has been focusing on sports recently, as it recently won the rights to broadcast 10 NFL Thursday Night Football games. This strategy, particularly the Copa America deal, should help the social media platform in a few ways.
First, it will help Twitter tap into a worldwide, and particularly Hispanic, population. Univision has exclusive rights to the Spanish-language broadcast of the Copa America in the U.S., which the company expects to draw an average audience of 1.8 million viewers per game in the age 18-49 demographic. This would be more than the 2014 FIFA World Cup.
There are an estimated 55 million Hispanics in the U.S., according to the latest U.S. Census, and more than 25% of this population point to soccer as their favorite sport, according to NBC News. If a significant portion of this group watches the Copa America broadcast, then Twitter can tap into this population.
Secondly, the sports-heavy strategy will help Twitter compete with Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat, each of which has made its own strides in securing deals to stream sports content in the last year.
These partnerships should be especially important on mobile, where video has been surging. The major social media platforms have all been pushing heavily to promote videos on their mobile platforms, and watching sporting events on a smartphone is no different.
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