Yahoo and ABC News have joined their online news efforts to leverage Yahoo’s large audience and ABC’s worldwide news production. The two media giants estimate they will serve over 100 million U.S. users per month.
ABC’s morning show Good Morning America has relaunched as a Yahoo site, and George Stephanopoulos will webcast an interview with President Obama on Yahoo and ABCNews.com today at 2:35 p.m. ET.
The announcement comes at an interesting moment for Yahoo. Last month, its board fired CEO Carol Bartz, naming Chief Financial Officer Timothy Morse as interim CEO. Yahoo and Microsoft’s search partnership has not met either party’s expectations, and Yahoo has lost a number of key executives in recent months.
Yahoo is still positioned as a media company, but it has struggled to find an identity, and analysts point out that media companies don’t tend to do well with finance people at the helm. Jack Ma, CEO of Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba, has expressed interest in buying Yahoo, which owns a partial stake in his company, but Yahoo has not announced anything specific about any mergers, acquisitions or a permanent CEO hiring.
Poynter points out that today’s partnership looks remarkably like one announced in 2000 between the same two companies. The content looks different this time, but the arrangement is familiar. AdAge reports that former ABCNews.com manager Bernie Gershon said the past arrangement was “lucrative for both parties,” but it lost steam due to editorial disagreements.
How do you think this deal will affect ABC and Yahoo? Let us know in the comments.
