An executive from ABC News announced on Good Morning America this Monday that the broadcasting company is entering into an exclusive content-sharing partnership with Yahoo!.
Similar to the AOL-Huffington Post partnership, this venture will combine two major media powerhouses to feature ABC’s news coverage prominently on Yahoo!’s web portal, which commands an audience of 80 million unique visitors a month. The two companies will also combine bureaus and resources as well as co-produce events, though they will maintain separate editorial control. Prior to the partnership, ABC News received 20 to 25 million unique visitors per month.
In a statement, Ross Levinsohn, executive vice president of Americas at Yahoo!, said that the partnership would “further strengthen Yahoo! as the No. 1 online news source.”
“ABC News and [President] Ben Sherwood’s vision is completely symbiotic with ours; together we can create highly engaging experiences for more than 100 million users a month that will set the standard for the industry.”
Their partnership begins effectively today, with Yahoo! exclusively livestreaming George Stephanopolous’s interview of President Barack Obama today at 12:30 EST.
Combined, these two companies may pose a significant challenge to the AOL-HuffPost partnership, particularly given ABC’s renowned reporting and journalistic powerhouses such as Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, and Christine Amanpour.
Though the combined AOL and Huffington Post audiences were estimated to reach nearly 117 million unique visitors each month when their partnership was announced last February, political content — half of that being paid news — only drove fifteen percent of HuffPo’s pre-partnership traffic, as its founder Arianna Huffington disclosed in an interview with The Washington Post.