In the previous media era, a TV broadcaster’s fortunes were defined by carriage agreements with cable operators, and the ads sold over those channels.
But, in the new world, those agreements are actually a brake on digital expansion that can bring new revenue from over-the-top video.
That is according to the man holding the purse strings for business news outlet Bloomberg’s ad sales division, Bloomberg Media.
“Having few carriage agreements means that we can broadcast our linear feed without user authentication,” Bloomberg Media global chief revenue officer Keith Grossman tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“There’s very few barriers to entry to being able to experience Bloomberg TV on an OTT device. That has been a huge advantage. Whereas we may have been at a disadvantage for years on the scale and penetration of our linear feed, in digital we can scale up tremendously.”
Case in point – Bloomberg TV videos now clock up around 20mn unique visitors, making Grossman happy to be challenging the likes of Yahoo Finance in the business category’s leading pack.
Online, Bloomberg is performing ad replacement, swapping spots that happen in the TV feed with digital, targeting video ads.
Today, most of the online ad sales are brokered by staff, directly. But Bloomberg does a bit of programmatic selling, too – and Grossman believes all digital ads will eventually be facilitated programmatically.