Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) keeps brokering interactive marketing deals with old-school media companies. Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA) is best known for its cable programming service that delivers televised programming to more than 24 million homes. However, it also bundles its television service with broadband connectivity and phone service.
No, Yahoo! won't be invading your television box or wired telephone. Not yet, anyway. This deal calls for Yahoo! to provide display and video ads to Comcast.net.
It's a meatier destination than you think. The portal serves as the default home page for the company's Internet access subscribers, at least until members discover the option to change that to something like Fool.com through the Tools drop-down menu.
To be fair, Comcast.net is better than most ISP landing pages, so I don't necessarily blame those who stick with it. A lot of people do, apparently. The company delivers 2.5 billion pages and 80 million video streams to 15 million unique monthly visitors. Most of those are part of the 12 million subscribers to Comcast's high-speed Internet service.
Yahoo! won't be getting all of that traffic. Comcast still plans to sell Internet ads to local cable advertisers through bundled packages. However, it's another nice catch for Yahoo!. It comes after the company has spent the past few months striking deals with major newspapers to provide sponsored ads and HotJobs.com employment listings through the active newspaper websites.
Every virtual real estate win is a twofold victory in paid search. Obviously, a deal like this helps Yahoo!'s financial performance. However, it also succeeds in keeping pesky rivals like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) away.
That's important. The quest to matter in online advertising is all about widening wingspans. Companies are hooking up with content sites to broaden the reach of their ads, while snapping up interactive marketing specialists like DoubleClick (going to Google) and Right Media (going to Yahoo!) to diversify their advertising products.
It's a war that never ends. For Yahoo! today, it's a Comcastic battle that ends in victory.
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Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz enjoys the "it's Comcastic" jingles. Yes, his standards are that low for entertainment these days. He does not own shares in any of the companies in this story. He is also part of the
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