Ben Sherwood and Ross LevinsohnPartnership will bring advertisers more premium video content
"The future of news and information is completely up for grabs," ABC News president Ben Sherwood said today at a press conference with. And with a sweeping partnership that will join Yahoo!'s reach and digital expertise with ABC's deep news organization, both announced their intention to grab the future.
The partnership will bring about deeper integration with ABC News material on Yahoo!, the launch of new GoodMorningAmerica.com on Yahoo!, new Yahoo! series from ABC anchors and correspondents, and coordinated editorial planning for branded content and event coverage.
The deal also expands the amount of premium video that advertisers will be able to buy from Yahoo!. When Ross Levinsohn, Executive Vice-President of Yahoo! Americas, was asked what this deal meant for advertisers, he pointed to the audience, filled with ABC luminaries such as Dianne Sawyer, Barbara Walters, Katie Couric, and Christiane Amanpour. "Look at the first two rows here," he said. "What advertiser doesn't want to be associated with this team?"
The partnership builds on what Yahoo! has already been doing with Web video, where it has 10 of the top 10 video series and more users than Hulu. It connects ABC's journalism to what Sherwood calls Super Bowl-sized audience of roughly 100 million news users. "My dream is to work with the 90% of the American voting public who visit Yahoo," he says.
Read more about the alliance, and check out the first fruits of it—a live interview of President Obama with George Stephanopoulos today on Yahoo!.
--Jeff Sweat, Editor-in-Chief
