Anthony Noto executive profile: Twitter COO's push into video - Business Insider - 0 views
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Anthony Noto, COO of Twitter, and former Goldman Sachs banker, is leading the company
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He's betting the company on a risky strategy: to turn the social network, famous for celebrity feuds, trolls and Donald Trump, into a destination for live video — from sports to financial news to political debates.
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Noto, a Silicon Valley outsider known for his hard-charging style, has struggled to convince investors or Valley insiders that his plan can really fix the company.
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"Anthony has such a strong belief in his own intelligence that it's hard for him to learn. He believed himself smarter and better at everyone’s job,” this person said.
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Last year, Noto became known inside the company as the man with a growth plan: to go all-in on video.
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It cost Twitter a reported $10 million for those rights, a mere $1 million per game, instead of the tens of millions of dollars per game that traditional media outlets pay.
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Last spring Twitter announced more than 12 partners who will launch original shows on topics of business, sports and entertainment — the types of things that people already like to Tweet about. And Noto wants Twitter to have enough content to fill 24 hours of live programming, he told BuzzFeed in April.
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So far, Bloomberg has signed on to give that a try, and will launch 24x7 streaming in the fall. Plus Twitter plans to launch Stadium in the fall, too, a 24-hour sports network.
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"Users matter," RBC Capital Market's Mark Mahaney told Business Insider, who rates the stock an "underperform" and dropped his price target for the stock to $14. While he believes Twitter will slowly add more users, "I think the best growth days for Twitter are behind them," he predicts.
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"It's like your relative who you love that keeps making a bunch of bad decisions over and over again, that's Twitter," one top exec who left a couple of months ago said.
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It faces heavy competition from better-funded companies like Facebook, Google, Netflix and Amazon. Noto will likely also need to pay to develop content, which could become a big new expense, compared to crowdsourced tweets, some analysts point out.
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"People are using Twitter for all sorts of different purposes, but they are not going there to watch video," warns eMarketer's Debra Williamson.