Twitter Inc. (TWTR, Financial) announced it is partnering with financial news outlet Bloomberg to create a streaming service that will produce news content solely for the social media platform.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the partnership was announced at an event held for advertisers by Bloomberg founder Michael Bloomberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
The deal looks to expand on the company's previous endeavors with live video. In the fall of 2016, Twitter streamed live NFL games on Thursday nights. It also partnered with Bloomberg to stream the presidential debates leading up to the election.Â
Twitter also has a feature powered by Periscope that enables users to broadcast live video. The technology was developed by Kayvon Beykpour and Joe Bernstein and acquired by Twitter before its launch in 2015.
With the Bloomberg deal, the company is likely attempting to attract advertisers back to its platform. Despite reporting better-than-expected first-quarter results last week, the company still recorded a decline in revenue for the first time since going public. Video, however, contributed to the largest portion of the company's advertising revenues.
During the quarter, the company also witnessed growth in its user base. Below is a chart of Twitter's monthly active users dating back to the first quarter of 2010.
Monthly active users is a key performance indicator for social networking services. The metric is calculated using the number of users who log in and out of the platform each month. The social media platform's monthly active users increased 6% from 319 million users in the fourth quarter of 2016 to 328 million users in the first quarter of 2017.
After the company's April 26 earnings report, Dorsey purchased 574,000 shares of Twitter on April 28. He now owns 16.04 million total shares of the company.
Twitter has a mediocre 6 of 10 financial strength rating according to GuruFocus.
The bright side, however, is the company has momentum with a strong Altman Z-Score of 3.68 and a quick ratio of 9.60, meaning it has good short-term financial strength and is not in danger of filing for bankruptcy.
Twitter is currently trading around $17.41, 26.80% above its 52-week low of $13.73.
Disclosure: Author does not currently own any shares of this company.
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