Yahoo has landed the search deal to handle all of Viacom’s 33 web sites, mostly for the Viacom TV network brands like MTV, Nickelodeon and ComedyCentral. If it goes well, Viacom could throw in another 140 Viacom sites.
This is perhaps the price the Google pays for upsetting Viacom through failing to eliminate Viacom copyrighted material from YouTube promptly enough. The search advertising will be powered be the new Panama system that Yahoo has just finished.
This could be the turning point for a Yahoo which ended last year showing the strain of trying to keep up with Google and began looking its age. It had weak advertising sales, revenue up, but not enough, and its profits plummeting, partly on the failure to bring this new advertising platform to market. Now the technology is there, and the wind has changed for Google, Yahoo could be ready to strike back.
Viacom has recently taken legal action against Google asking for $1 billion in damages for hosting over 100,000 items of its content on the YouTube site.