Thursday, December 07, 2006

SPONSORED SEARCH://Google and News Corp expand ties

Google scored another distribution deal yesterday, this time it was BSkyB. Before that, we saw AOL , Intuit, eBay non-US, Vodafone UK and a Sky-sister: Fox Interactive Media (including MySpace).

The deal includes search and sponsored search, video technology (for a UGC portal) and communications (a customised Gmail version, supplying @sky.com addresses). These services are available to Sky broadband subs.

My takes on this:

First, apparently there are warm relations between Google and News Corp, opening the door to further expansion.

Second, it reminds me of Yahoo!'s access deals with Verizon, AT&T, Rogers and BT (except of course, Yahoo! aggregates a whole lot of content with it). Google and Yahoo! are clearly fighting to win partners. Of interest is that Vodafone UK works with both Google (sponsored search) and Yahoo! (display ads), as does eBay (Yahoo! in the US, Google elsewhere). It comes as somewhat of a surprise to me that News Corp doesn't join this divide & conquer strategy.


1 comment:

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