Deal Makes Turner, Yahoo! Teammates

NEW YORK Turner Sports will provide video and text content to Yahoo!'s NBA, golf and Nascar channels in a partnership whereby Turner will manage ad sales and the two companies will share revenue.For Turner, it provides the opportunity to put its digital sports rights -- all but live NBA games -- in front of a larger audience. It also will be able to sell ads on the Yahoo Sports channels in addition to its other platforms, from the NBA on TNT to NBA.com and its other Turner-managed league-owned sites PGATour.com, PGA.com and Nascar.com."Now we have the opportunity to take those brands and extend them even further into the marketplace," Turner Sports president David Levy said. He estimated that 80 percent of the Yahoo Sports audience are unduplicated users and impressions beyond the league sites Turner manages.The deal is part of Yahoo's strategy to partner with content providers, similar to the deals it has struck with WebMD and CNET in which ad sales inventory has been outsourced. But that's also not the case with most of Yahoo's channels and won't be, said Todd Teresi, svp of Yahoo Publisher Channel. Teresi said the Turner deal gives Yahoo! access to revenue that it wouldn't have normally received on its own.Yahoo Sports and Games GM Jimmy Pitaro said that from the content side, the Turner deal is a template for the future as the company would like to partner with other content providers.In choosing Yahoo!, Turner passed over corporate sibling AOL. But Levy said that didn't mean a deal with AOL or another company couldn't become a reality."This is a nonexclusive deal," he said. "Certainly we'll be talking to AOL, and we have been."

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Deal Makes Turner, Yahoo! Teammates

Paul J. Gough

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Paul J. Gough