Partnerships between social network giants and media conglomerates make a lot of sense. The social networks want everyone using them to talk about what's happening in the world, and the conglomerates want all that talk to be about the media that they produce. So it's a natural thought that they would work together to direct their consumers to each other.
Hence the lack of surprise at the recent news that the National Football League and Twitter have signed a two-year partnership agreement that will bring things like NFL highlights and behind-the-scenes news and footage to more Twitter feeds in the near future. Twitter is already the place for commentary on current events (the Super Bowl ads alone lead to endless streams of commentary) so it makes sense for the NFL to want to highlight, and to some extent, control that conversation.
And, according to Peter Kafka in "More Football is Coming to Your Twitter Feed, Courtesy of a New Deal with the NFL" on Re/Code, the deal furthers the goals of Twitter's "Project Lightning," which is an attempt to bolster Twitter's coverage of big, live, real-time events, of which the NFL has plenty every week, including one of the biggest ones in the world, the Super Bowl, every year.
The partnership between Twitter and the NFL is an extension of yearly deals that began in 2013, though this is the first multi-year deal, and the first one that will allow the two entities to share revenue from the ads that are consumed via the NFL content on Twitter. The NFL also has partnership deals with Facebook and YouTube.
As Kafka notes, this deal also shows that while Twitter's leadership may be up in the air, they are still capable of making important deals that can shore up the future of the company, no matter who is at the helm.