Mickey Mouse is bleeding purple today.
Yahoo!
The two media giants are no slouches on their own, but they combine to reach 100 million people in the U.S. each month -- roughly a third of the country --online.
How will these two behemoths work together? Well, you can see it right now. GoodMorningAmerica.com was relaunched this morning, redirecting to a new URL at gma.yahoo.com where news stories are updated around the clock.
Each company will do what it does best, but there will also be some proprietary content to keep audiences routinely checking back.
Yahoo! has wrestled between the models of generating its own content or leaning on third-party providers. It gets to do a little bit of both here.
There is plenty at stake here. Once it unloaded a few enterprise-facing assets and agreed to outsource its search business to Microsoft's
Yahoo!, AOL
The deal with ABC News is still a smart one for both companies. Yahoo! gets to associate with a marquee news reporting brand, while Disney gets to maximize its exposure through the Internet leader in the news categories that matter.
Disney has been a rumored buyer of Yahoo! for years. An acquisition no longer makes sense, and the corporate culture at both companies will be grateful for that. An alliance is the right move for both companies. Anything else would just be flat out goofy.
If you want to follow the Yahoo! saga closely, add Yahoo! to My Watchlist.