Twitter's (TWTR) Convention Stream Faces Tough Competition, NYT's Manjoo Tells CNBC

The New York Times' Farhad Manjoo and BuzzFeed's Charlie Warzel discussed Twitter's (TWTR) deal with CBS (CBS) to live stream the Democratic and Republican National Conventions on CNBC today.
By Lindsay Rittenhouse ,

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Tech reporters Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times and Charlie Warzel of BuzzFeed discussed Twitter's (TWTR) - Get Report partnership with CBS (CBS) to live stream the Democratic and Republican conventions on CNBC's "Squawk Alley" Monday.

Per the partnership, CBS News' 24-hour digital channel will stream on Twitter for this year's Republican and Democratic National Conventions, the companies announced earlier this morning. Both four-day conventions will be held toward the end of July.

This is a "larger push" from Twitter to gain more users as it hopes people will view the site as a "place to watch the conventions and all kinds of news events," Manjoo said.

However, Twitter will face tough competition from Facebook (FB), which is moving "aggressively" forward with its live streaming feature Facebook Live, he continued.

"That's going to be really difficult for Twitter I think. If they had done this six months ago it may have been easier, but I really worry that people are just going to start thinking about this stuff on Facebook rather than Twitter now," Manjoo explained.

Facebook's "algorithmic" news feed is also an advantage over Twitter's chronological feed which users tend to "fly" through, missing posts, he added.

"But when you look at Twitter, Twitter is a place for real-time news as it happens. People are there to absorb all this information and to be able to have these little windows where you don't have any barriers, you can just click it and open it, and that's huge," Warzel noted.

Shares of Twitter are declining by 2.27% to $17.67 in early afternoon trading on Monday.

(Twitter is held in Jim Cramer's charitable trust Action Alerts PLUS. See all of his holding with a free trial here.)

Separately, TheStreet Ratings rated Twitter as a "sell" with a score of D.

This is driven by a number of negative factors, one of the most important has been a generally disappointing historical performance in the stock itself.

You can view the full analysis from the report here: TWTR

TheStreet Ratings objectively rated this stock according to its "risk-adjusted" total return prospect over a 12-month investment horizon. Not based on the news in any given day, the rating may differ from Jim Cramer's view or that of this articles's author.

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