VAIL, CO — Bloomberg Media may now be finding its TV audience is almost half the size of that it gets on the Internet – but that doesn’t faze CEO Justin Smith – he thinks putting TV in the shade puts Bloomberg on the right path.
“Bloomberg Media is now a majority digital video company,” Smith tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We reach about 8 or 9 million viewers a month on US television. On Bloomberg digital platforms, we reach 14 million viewers a month.
“It’s a significantly larger number of viewers. One could view that as a weakness, but, given the trends… it’s a tremendous advantage, fuelling a lot of our advertising growth.”
The outweighing of TV by digital media may not be surprising for a company that has, to some, best been known as the provider of terminals and stock data over digital wires.
But the Bloomberg Media division is tackling more than just provision of data. A year ago, it set out to create five new thematic vertical brands alongside its core Bloomberg business news – Bloomberg Markets, Bloomberg Politics, Bloomberg Technology, Bloomberg Pursuits and Bloomberg Opinion.
The sites have variously adopted bold designs, alongside a Businessweek site that nowadays mixes regular business reporting with vivid, web-specific visual tricks. It’s a feast for the eyes that evokes something of HotWired, one of the web’s earliest tech content sites.
Now Bloomberg Politics is coming into its own, with five million monthly uniques, pushed by show carriage across Bloomberg and MSNBC plus a co-production agreement with Showtime, Smith says: “Our audience cares tremendously about the US presidential election. It’s the single largest business story every four years.
“So Bloomberg Politics is quite core. A lot of the content is resonating extremely well with our business audience who want to understand the implications of the race on their businesses.”
This interview took place at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado, in March.
