Yahoo on Wednesday announced a partnership with Belo Corp., a media group that will deliver exclusive video content from its television Web sites to Yahoo News.
Under the agreement, Belo will provide local news clips in 13 of the 15 markets where it operates television stations. They are all large or mid-sized cities, mostly spread throughout the Southwest, Northwest and Mid-Atlantic regions of the country.
The local news clips, which will be branded with Belo’s logo, are set to go live on the local pages of Yahoo News Wednesday night.
With the addition of Belo’s content, Yahoo News now boasts local TV coverage from stations in 18 of the country’s top 25 markets, according to the company.
“Given the surge in demand for online video on Yahoo News, and across the Internet, this deal with Belo’s television stations makes a lot of sense for our users,” Alan Warms, vice president and general manager of Yahoo News, said in a statement.
The announcement follows a similar exclusive syndication deal Yahoo struck last October to deliver local news from 16 CBS stations.
The companies will monetize the content through an ad-revenue sharing arrangement. Yahoo will place the ads through its network, and Belo will receive an undisclosed percentage of the revenue, Belo spokesman Paul Fry told InternetNews.com.
Fry said that this is the first video-sharing agreement Belo has reached with a major Web property.
By some estimates, 2008 will be a boom year for locally targeted advertising. The global market-analysis firm Research and Markets has predicted that local ad spending will jump 48 percent this year to $12.6 billion, driven in large part by online video and local search. Spending on locally placed video ads will triple this year to reach $1.3 billion, according to the firm.
Belo is a diversified media company whose properties include broadcast and cable television stations, newspapers and Web properties. Belo reports annual revenue of about $1.6 billion.
In 2005, the companies launched a classified-ad partnership, where postings from Belo’s newspaper Web sites would appear on Yahoo HotJobs. Wednesday’s agreement is the first video-sharing agreement between the two companies.
“We’ve enjoyed a good relationship with Yahoo, and we’ll be looking forward to other opportunities that might make sense,” Fry said.
