HONG KONG: Bloomberg, the business-focused media group, plans to expand its TicToc 24-hour video news channel into Asia, as it seeks to broaden its appeal to younger consumers.

As reported by Mumbrella, TicToc was launched in the US only in December last year, yet the company says it has already built up 171,000 followers and averages 750,000 viewers every day.

The new 24/7 network is designed to be used on Twitter, offering five-minute global news summaries, live coverage of breaking stories and contextualised video stories.

Now, just three months later, Bloomberg plans to double its coverage of the Asia region and has pulled together a team of 12 journalists at its newsroom in Hong Kong, using TicToc to gain the attention of younger audiences.

“We have a very ambitious goal,” said M. Scott Havens, global head of digital at Bloomberg Media, in an interview with Mumbrella.

“The younger generation is not going to have a cable news network, they’re going to Twitter; they’re on their phone. We want to create a native news network they can be connected with,” he explained.

As for its revenue-generating potential, Havens said of the new platform: “TicToc is the most monetisable product I’ve ever worked with. And I’ve been doing this for 20 years.

“We’ve sold ten figures in US dollars of sponsorship. We’re making good money [from] selling advertising. We see a lot of growth there within advertising and maybe beyond.”

For Bloomberg, the rapid expansion of its TicToc news service appears to align with its determination to take on the “duopoly” of Google and Facebook through the development of innovative products.

Speaking to The Drum earlier this month, Justin Smith, CEO of Bloomberg Media Group, stated that growing through innovation is the company’s “guiding principle” and that working with Twitter “makes sense”.

“Twitter is much, much larger in terms of audience and engagement with news-seeking consumers than any other media platform,” he said.

“So building hybrid products between a content and journalism-based company and the social media platform that has the most news consumers in the world makes a lot of sense.”

Sourced from Mumbrella, Bloomberg, The Drum; additional content by WARC staff