A growing number of content deals drove up the amount of revenue Twitter paid back to publishers in 2018 by 60 percent for a second consecutive year, Digiday reported.

Twitter now has 950 content deals with media companies such as the NBA, BuzzFeed and CNN. It also has deals with publishers who organically upload videos to Twitter and make money from Twitter’s ad products. The content deals produce most of the revenue that Twitter sends back to publishers. Twitter has 134 million “monetizable” daily active users, Bloomberg reported.

Selling to them is not that hard of a pitch, said Kay Madati, Twitter’s head of content partnerships, in a Digiday interview.

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“When something happens in the world, it also happens on Twitter,” Madati said. “A lot of our advertisers and publishers are wrapped up in the offline iterations of the content we’re bringing to the world. We think we are a must-buy.”

Born in Norway and raised in Tanzania, Madati was named head of Twitter content partnerships in 2017 following a period of executive turnover. Twitter at the time had been struggling to excite investors who had “been souring on shaky user metrics in recent quarters,” Variety reported. It had been struggling to grow user numbers. The new hire came at a time when the firm was aggressively pushing its video content strategy to accommodate a variety of content such as live sports.

A father, Facebook veteran and champion of charter schools, Madati came to Twitter from BET, where he was executive vice president of digital media. Before BET, he was head of entertainment and media global marketing solutions at Facebook.

Asked whether Twitter is looking to compete with TV, Madati replied, “Most of our content executions are complementary, not competitive — they have to be. We are not replicating what’s happening on TV.

“Where the money comes from is less important to me. I don’t go into these relationships with the mindset that need to chase TV budgets, versus digital budgets, versus social budgets … I’m not greedy, I’ll take the money from wherever it comes.”