Disney/ABC has reached a new and expanded deal with Yahoo that will add a Yahoo-branded segment to Good Morning America and make clips of ABC’s top entertainment properties, including Scandal and Jimmy Kimmel Live, available on the site.
The GMA segment, Yahoo Your Day, will each day feature Yahoo editors and experts, including style editor Joe Zee, beauty editor Bobbi Brown and food editor Kerry Diamond. Flickr images will be integrated into GMA weather reports, and Tumblr will be featured in the morning show’s Social Square.
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The companies also will develop a more robust partnership on major news events, including the 2016 presidential election. Interestingly, content from Katie Couric, who left ABC News last year and joined Yahoo in a reported $6 million deal as its global news anchor, will be distributed across ABC News. Couric is known to have been looking for a TV home for her Yahoo interviews, which have included Michael Bloomberg and Bryan Cranston, who last year won a Tony for his portrayal of President Lyndon Johnson in Broadway’s All the Way.
ABC News first partnered with Yahoo in 2011. The deal, hammered out by former ABC News president Ben Sherwood, who in February assumed the top post at Disney/ABC, put ABC News content on the Yahoo home page, sending the news division’s web traffic soaring.
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Now the Yahoo-ABC News Network has reached more than 129 million users across combined digital platforms every month, according to comScore, and has been the top source of news and information online for 34 consecutive months.
The expanded deal broadens that distribution to ABC entertainment properties; Disney/ABC will create and deploy exclusive clips from entertainment content on ABC and ABC Family. For instance, on Thursday the site featured a sneak peak of Scandal and stars Scott Foley and Tony Goldwyn interviewing each other.
ABC News president James Goldston noted that the expanded deal is a way to “supercharge” that partnership.
“The deal massively expands the reach of our news content and it brings that firehouse of traffic in support of all of those amazing [ABC entertainment] shows,” said Goldston. “We’re well aware that we need to be putting our journalism in front of a new generation of viewers and readers, which comes at storytelling in different ways and finds our work in different ways. And we see this as a giant step forward in making that happen.”
And Goldston differentiated the GMA Yahoo segment from the now obligatory morning show segments that promote content from a corporate sibling.
“It’s not just a promotional exercise,” Goldston said. “These segments are going to have real information. From Joe Zee to Bobbi Brown, these are real experts that are going to bring our viewers things they didn’t know and give them a slice of all of these worlds in a way that they haven’t seen before. I don’t see it as just a synergy exercise.”
7:12 a.m. Updated with comments from ABC News president James Goldston.
