Yahoo and Turner form interesting alliance ...

From TV week in the US - "Turner Broadcasting System and Yahoo! have made a multiyear strategic content and advertising deal for sports-related content. Turner will exclusively represent online advertising sales, including display, sponsorship and video advertising, for Yahoo! Sports’ NBA, golf and NASCAR pages"

http://www.tvweek.com/news/2008/07/turner_yahoo_sports_enter_cont.php

I think this sort of deal is an interesting one. In my opinion, it sees Yahoo! outsourcing selected sales duties to a company more equipped, skilled to sell this content to market. Turner handles nba.com as well as other sports properties as is a leader in this space in the US. As a result these Yahoo properties also get better access to premium content from nba.com, the PGA tour and Nascar.

This has potential locally I think. Given there's a shortage of sales talent could we see, as an example, a group like sportal sell sport content on a major portal, and in turn provide better content to these groups. Or Business Spectator do the same with a portal finance offering and also give them access to their content from Kohler etc. CNet/ZD or Gizmodo selling Tech/Gadget info etc.

I like the idea as it gives specialist sites the ability to further distribute their content and monetise their sales expertise ... for the larger site it allows them to focus their sales efforts in areas they have the skills to do so in.

This just in: Blogs on the up whilst the News category remains flat

If you need more evidence that the line between semi-pro (or pro-am or whatever you want to call it) and professional journalism content is blurring rapidly, lets have a look at usage data between topline News (ie journalists) figures and the unduplicated audience of the top 4 blog platforms.

According to Neilsen Netview, the topline News & Information figures (which is a unduplicated figure taking into account News Digital Media, The Age, SMH, BBC, Yahoo!7 News, National Nine News, NY Times, Bigpond NEws, Google News, Conde Nast, Daily Mail, CNN etc) only saw essentially a zero usage increase from April 07 to April 08 - from 7.785m in April 07 to 7.786m in April 08.

Now lets look at the unduplicated figures of the top 4 blogging platforms - blogger, wordpress, typepad and livejournal.

April 07 - 1.839m

April 08 - 2.484m

That is a YOY increase of 35%. What does this show? Well .. people are turning to blogs more and more to get their information. Why is this? Well ... I don't have the definitive answer ... but I believe that blogs offer more credibility and passion than their larger counterparts - especially in niche areas (which we all know become quite big when there are enough niche's combined). And this doesn't even cover sites like Perez Hilton, TMZ, Gizmodo, Defamer, Slashdot etc - which I would argue are blogs by format and design.

It's not all bad for the News & Information category - page views per user per month are up YOY from 65 to 74. Still, if I had the choice between a marginal increase in consumption or a major increase in users I know which one I'd take.

Maybe we will start seeing large news site bloggers become more than just light entertainment 'columnists' and actual evolve to being actual experts on what they're covering.