Twitter tightens grip on NFL games
The National Football League signed a multiyear agreement with Twitter to deliver video and highlights yearround, expanding on an existing relationship in which game highlights were offered on the microblogging site.
Partners since 2013, the most- watched U. S. sports league and Twitter will offer brands the chance to present football content created for Twitter on PCs, tablets and mobile devices. Terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed.
Twitter users will have access to in- game highlights, as well as breaking news and analysis.
“Twitter users and brands cannot get enough NFL video and news, and they’ll now get more of it, and faster, than ever before,” Glenn Brown, Twitter’s head of content partnerships, said in a statement.
Twitter has been striking deals with video-content owners, seeking to attract users and advertisers. The company has also had agreements with Viacom to host stand-up comedy clips from Comedy Central, weather forecasts from Weather Channel and college basketball clips from Turner Broadcasting.
Twitter’s stock rose 8.2 percent on Monday after it unveiled the NFL deal and its executives said they’re buying shares in the company.
On Friday, the stock closed at its lowest level since its November 2013 initial public offering, a slump that began in July when Jack Dorsey, co-founder and interim chief executive officer, warned that it will take a while before Twitter is able to reverse a slowdown in user growth.
On Monday, Dorsey promoted his purchase of about $ 875,000 in shares with a tweet saying, “Investing in@ twitter’s future.” Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto and board member Peter Fenton also bought Twitter shares last week, according to regulatory filings. It’s not the first time Twitter’s executives have coordinated their actions when confidence was low. Before reporting disappointing first-quarter sales, Twitter’s insiders halted all their sales for a few weeks.
At the time of Twitter’s IPO, the company was heralded as a high-growth stock with the potential to be the next Facebook Inc. Instead, the San Francisco-based company has failed to grow as fast as expected. Twitter has endured months of pressure over the user numbers, tweaking its features and shuffling its product and engineering leadership, without much progress.
The 2014 NFL regular season reached 202.3 million viewers, representing 80 percent of television homes and 68 percent of potential viewers in the U.S., according to Nielsen.
The NFL has 12.6 million followers on its official Twitter account.