It’s not as impressive as the $19 billion Facebook splashed out for WhatsApp, but Twitter still shelled out a respectable amount -- $86.6 million, to be precise -- for live video streaming
broadcast app Periscope and social media marketing platform Niche, according to the company’s filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
While the filing
didn’t break down the separate prices paid for these companies, according to industry scuttlebutt Niche, which matches advertisers with social media influencers, cost Twitter around $30 million,
putting Periscope at around $57 million. Together the transactions included common stock valued at $57.7 million and $28.9 million in cash.
Recode first reported the rough price for
Niche when the acquisition first became public knowledge back in February, citing people familiar with the deal.
The acquisition of Periscope was widely viewed as a bid by Twitter to outflank
Meerkat, an online streaming video broadcast platform that first made waves in the lead up to the SXSW conference, in effect piggybacking on Twitter. Twitter moved swiftly to shut out Meerkat as its
popularity grew in March, blocking its access to Twitter’s social graph and making it much harder for users to reach pre-selected groups of users, for example via push notifications. Twitter had
just announced its acquisition of Periscope just days before (hoping to differentiate itself from Periscope, earlier this month Meerkat announced that it is launching a developer platform).
Meanwhile video will be a key driver for Twitter’s ad business in 2015, according to research from J.P. Morgan, which predicts: “Twitter … will likely become an increasingly
important form of engagement for brands given the ability to communicate with consumers in real-time and now to utilize video more effectively on the platform.”