In Bid for Sports Dominance, Yahoo and NBC Make Web Deal

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 Spo rts 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 importan t 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.”

WMVY-FM Aims to Shift to Web Streaming as a Nonprofit

The radio station WMVY-FM in Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts is beloved by many listeners for its eclectic alternative programming and local news and sports, but since 2008, that affection has not translated into enough advertisers to keep it profitable.

So the owner, Aritaur Communications, is staking out an unusual path to keep the music alive: if it raises $600,000 in donations by the end of January, it will try to reinvent WMVY as a nonprofit Web streaming venture.

“It's not often that a commercial operation gets up and says we're going into the noncommercial, public radio business,” said Joe Gallagher, Aritaur's president. “But I think that in this case it fits: it fits the programming, it fits the sensitivity, and I think it's ultimately the one that works.”

In recent years, WMVY has lost as much as “big six figures” annually, Mr. Gallagher said by telephone. Rather than switch formats, Aritaur announced in November that it was sellin g WMVY's 92.7 FM frequency - pending approval by the Federal Communications Commission - to WBUR-FM, the nearby Boston public radio station.

Aritaur will keep the sale proceeds, but donate other assets, including WMVY's format, staff and equipment, to the nonprofit Friends of MVY if the $600,000 - a year's expenses - is raised. So far, more than $175,000 has been pledged, and Mr. Gallagher said one major donor had made an offer as he sought to assemble a governing board.

WMVY was a pioneer in online streaming beginning in 1998, and about 30,000 unique listeners tune in monthly to the live stream. The Web stream is already supported by donations, but the station must “be able to convince a much higher percentage of its listeners to continue to donate to keep it going,” he said.

The number of online listeners is not enough to sustain a commercial venture, he said, adding, “The power of MVY is its deep, deep relationship with its listeners.”

In a telephone interview, the country singer Lyle Lovett, who is based in Texas, agreed. “I know about WMVY because of the feedback I've gotten from listeners,” he said. Asked about the value of broadcast or Internet radio among services like Pandora that offer personalized playlists, Mr. Lovett said that, given the diffuse nature of music listening, “I don't know anything anymore.” But he said he sold more concert tickets in cities with stations like WMVY that play adult album alternative music like his.

While he plans a streaming future for WMVY, Mr. Gallagher said that he would also someday like to find a new broadcast outlet and that he was exploring options in the public radio realm. He said he was talking to the owner of a Vineyard-licensed noncommercial FM station, not yet broadcasting, or may try to piggyback on another commercial station's digital frequency.