Twitter CEO Dick Costolo doesn’t want to get into TV or news, but sees ways for his company to partner with those who are. Today at the D11 Conference, Costolo is looking for ways to be complementary to companies who curate content while also providing a way for users to distribute their own content.
The company is investing heavily in finding ways to work with broadcasters and to provide complementary experiences for TV. On that front, it’s been a big year for Twitter, as the company has been aggressively trying to grow its ads business with broadcasters.
It’s doing that by partnering with big media companies for services like TV ad targeting. For TV, the company is hoping to drive tune-in by creating new ways for broadcasters to reach their audiences.
“We’re like a global town square,” Costolo said. “It’s public, it’s realtime, it’s conversational, and it’s widely distributed.”
For Costolo, that allows Twitter to provide global, public distribution to all of its users. It’s then the goal of the media companies to take those comments and to curate the conversation about them. At the same time, Costolo thinks that the faster distribution of information means that it can be vetted more quickly as well.
“If you think about the way information is distributed [on Twitter], it’s inside out, it’s multidirectional… and it’s raw” Costolo said. “The beauty of twitter today is that… when rumors surface, the crowd is doing a good job of sorting out what’s real and what’s rumor more quickly.”
Twitter is working to make its ad offerings more broadly available to even small- and medium-sized businesses. It’s also trying to provide a platform for them to have conversations with their customers.
The company has acquired a couple of companies that will hopefully add more media to its service. That includes the acquisition of user-generated video startup Vine, as well as the launch of Twitter #Music earlier this year.
(Updating…)