Yahoo Sports and NBC Sports are tying their Web sites loosely together in an arrangement meant to give NBC more traffic online and Yahoo more promotion on television.
The deal, announced during “Football Night in America” on NBC, bears some similarities to previous alliances between Yahoo and ABC News, in the general news category, and Yahoo and CNBC, in financial news. In each case the Web sites remain independent but link to each other’s stories and make Web videos together, raising visibility for each other with minimal investment.
“Yahoo provides massive scale for the NBC Sports Group,” Mark Lazarus, the chairman of that group, said in an interview by phone on Sunday.
Though stopping far short of an actual merger, the two sites expect that their traffic will be measured together in a way that solidly makes them the No. 1 sports Web site in the United States. Yahoo came in a close second to ESPN in November rankings by the Web analytics company ComScore, which showed ESPN with 42 million unique visitors and Yahoo with 40 million. Sites operated by the NBC Sports Group ranked eighth, with 11 million visitors — evincing why NBC felt it necessary to find a new source of traffic.
Mr. Lazarus said that measuring the two together would “allow our sales force to walk into meetings with the ability to say we’re the No. 1 sports site.”
Yahoo Sports, for its part, will receive attention on the NBC Sports Network and other sports telecasts. Mr. Lazarus said viewers would see Yahoo Sports writers, “especially the ones who are TV-savvy,” on NBC Sports’ news and information shows. Viewers will also see promotion for Yahoo’s fantasy sports pages and specific Yahoo sites like Rivals.com, which focuses on college recruiting.
Ken Fuchs, the head of Yahoo sports and games, said the deal was “a great opportunity for us, frankly, to introduce a lot of what we do to new audiences on air.”
Yahoo will also gain some access — exactly how much remains to be seen — to NBC stars like Bob Costas when making original programming. It will link to live streams of NBC sports broadcasts and develop Web shows with NBC that will appear on both companies’ sites.
“As video becomes more and more important online,” Mr. Lazarus said, “having scale and reach will allow us to monetize that video to a greater degree.”
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
NBC Sports will be Yahoo Sports’ biggest partner by some standards, but not its only one. Yahoo will maintain a relationship with Turner Sports, for instance.
For Yahoo, the deal reaffirms an interest in collaboration with major media companies. Along with the ABC and CNBC deals, Yahoo recently paid an unknown sum to CBS to rename the syndicated entertainment show “The Insider” after a gossip site it operates, titled “omg!” Starting in January the show will be called “omg! Insider.”