Yahoo and Vevo broaden partnership

Yahoo and Vevo broaden partnership

Today Vevo announced broadening its distribution partnership with Yahoo which means that the Yahoo Screen will feature Vevo's videos on its web and mobile properties.

Vevo is a behemoth of the online video space, nine of its top ten artists reached over a billion views during 2013, but the company is still very much tied to YouTube - the platform that provides it with much of its traffic - and is keen on finding alternative distribution avenues.

Previously, the partnership with Yahoo was restricted to a syndication deal Yahoo Music, but now is poised to reach a lot more users as it rolls out to Yahoo's Home Page in the US and Canada and soon also in the UK, Spain, France and Germany.

Rio Caraeff, President and CEO of Vevo, commented: “Our renewed partnership with Yahoo will bring Vevo’s programming to more music fans than ever before,” … “Yahoo has the potential to be one of our largest partners, and our launch across Yahoo Screen and, soon in more countries and on more platforms, is a big win for viewers who want to watch their favorite music video programming anytime and anywhere.”

The prospect of bringing in millions of new views from Yahoo must be very appealing to Vevo as it seeks to lower the percentage of views that are coming directly from YouTube thus lowering its dependency on the Google-owned service. Vevo launched in Germany in September 2013 as a stand-alone service given YouTube's ongoing dispute with the local collection society GEMA, but has not yet revealed numbers from that territory. 

(Andrea Leonelli)