Comcast partners with Yahoo in ad deal

Comcast and Yahoo have forged a multi-year partnership for online display and video ad services on Comcast.net.

by Helen Leggatt

Yahoo will now sell 80 percent of display and video ads across the Comcast.net portal, seeing off AOL and Microsoft to seal the deal. Comcast, a top ten website, attracted 80 million video viewings in March, and has around 15 million unique visitors per month resulting in 2.5 billion page views.

"One of the reasons we selected Yahoo is its expertise in terms of video advertising," said D'Arcy Rudnay, VP-corporate communications at Comcast. "We think they have a very large sales force, they have good relationships already with advertisers, are well known and respected and have a sophisticated platform, we think, on technology."

Comcast expects to generate $1 billion in revenue in the next five or six years through a combination of display, video, search and text ad contracts. Comcast currently uses Google's search engine service and the three-year contract expires at the end of 2007. While the proposal for search/text ads has been distributed there is no confirmation of who would be awarded the contract. There is speculation that Google’s contract won’t be renewed and that Yahoo may step in to their shoes.

Some industry pundits feel that Comcast’s partnership with Yahoo is much bigger than it looks. Mark Cuban, of Blog Maverick, is of the opinion that, “Together Comcast and Yahoo have created an advertising playground that could potentially define the future of advertising on the net. Rules that even Google and Microsoft would have to follow.”