NDM Story #16 - BuzzFeed Expects to Bask in 'Biggest Twitter Moment Ever' With Live Election Coverage

BuzzFeed Expects to Bask in 'Biggest Twitter Moment Ever' With Live Election Coverage

Summary:

This article highlights the way that new and digital media has affected one of the biggest moments in American history: the 2016 elections. It goes on to suggest that this year "#Election2016" is the "start of many digital firsts" due to Buzzfeed's decision to live stream the election results via Twitter, as opposed to using a traditional media outlet. The article proposes the idea that the reason Buzzfeed chose to use Twitter as opposed to Facebook or YouTube for the livestream includes a number of reasons. Firstly, it is because Twitter has already been heavily associated as a platform which is thriving off of the elections due to the campaign that Donald Trump actually has from supporters using the micro blogging site. The second reason is because it also allows Buzzfeed to earn revenue from the "commercial breaks" (advertisement) which Facebook has not yet finalised. There are also a number of sponsors which Buzzfeed has, to support their live stream and they've also embraced this method as an opportunity to promote their new website "Tasty", it's cooking show which they planned to link in with the political stance remaining, in relation to the live stream. Comments on the debate itself will be shown alongside the live stream but they are trying to use algorithms to filter out any bad tweets regarding the election.
The point has also been made that almost every other major media company would be looking towards Facebook's streaming service, instead.
Buzzfeed, unlike traditional news outlets will not be using advanced technology such as holograms.

• According to Twitter, there has, so far been, 17 million tweets surrounding the topic of this year's presidential elections during their second debate, which surpasses the number regarding the Superbowl.
• The live stream that surrounded coverage of this debate hailed in 3.2 million viewers, the same number as those who watched NFL on using the live stream service.
• This has all happened despite the fact that Twitter is more than four times smaller, in audience size than Facebook, garnering only 317 million users in comparison to 1.8 billion.

My opinion is:

That this is an interesting phenomenon and I think that this really demonstrates how powerful new and digital media actually is becoming in this digital world. I find it particularly interesting that Buzzfeed are seemingly on a budget, given that they're using a more "analogue" approach to their broadcast, as opposed to overloading their service with digital gimmicks. I think this is either to keep a small budget or to retain the rawness of the result night in order to be as realistic as possible as viewers are engaged with the elections, almost as if they are there themselves.
However, I'd be intrigued to know whether (and if so, how) this decision would affect traditional news outlets and how drastically viewership of that service may decrease as a result of Buzzfeed taking initiative on Twitter. I think that it most likely will be quite influential in decreasing television broadcast viewer numbers since Twitter is so popular and also allows for direct commentary by the viewers. This would, of course, be good news for Twitter and Buzzfeed but negative from traditional media sources and particularly journalists and reporters (who don't currently work for Buzzfeed).