Yahoo! Lands Multi-Year Viacom Distribution Deal

Search and Search Marketing across Viacom online properties

[Marcia]

Story in Digital Media Asia News

Viacom, Yahoo enter web search distribution deal [digitalmediaasia.com]

Media company Viacom has entered into a multi-year search marketing and Web search distribution agreement with internet company Yahoo. Yahoo is to provide multiple search marketing and web search services to Viacom’s online properties, including BET.com, CBSNews.com, CMT.com, MTV.com, NickJr.com, SHO.com (Showtime Online) and VH1.com.

[matimer]

Ha ha ... "sho.com" sad they won't pony up for "showtime.com" or "show.com" cheapos....

[jcmoon]

I believe SHO has been their 3-letter abbreviation for a long time, as well as their logo. So it's not surprising that they'd identify with www.sho.com ... I'm somewhat surprised that they didn't register www.showtime,com, though. It doesn't exactly have anything at the moment.

But I've got a question about this deal. So, Viacom/CBS gets special Yahoo! advertising, services, etc out of this deal. What exactly is Y! getting out of it?

What I'd ideally like to see is to be able to download any video I want (tv episode, music video, etc) and watch it whenever I want. Ideally I'd like it to be free, although *very cheap* (think iTunes cheap) is something I'd live with. And with minimal DRM - not because I want to pirate it, but because I don't want to be tied down to a particular platform or media application.

Of course, I know Viacom wouldn't like this.

So I ask: what's Y! get out of this?

[mikko123]

I'm sure Yahoo provides the search functionality and supplements it with their contextual paid search results. They split the proceeds like any other regular publisher.

[Marcia]

That represents a lot of potential income, and a good part of what's in that deal seems to target users within a certain demographic.

[tictoc]

What does Yahoo get out of it?

They get ADVERTISING dollars out of it. Especially on MTV.com, CMT, etc. Google is missing out on this!

[Dalgar]

Yahoo also gets great publicity. Just the fact that we're talking about Yahoo Search Marketing, and how it is securing search advertisements instead of Google. For a top media company like Viacom.

People spending the big bucks are going to say, "hey, yahoo is a player in this field."