YouTube Partners with Hearst-Argyle TV
June 4, 2007 by Mike Abundo
Filed under Computers, Television
Now that so many of the big media companies and online video stars have forged deals with YouTube, the video-sharing site is surfing further down the Long Tail for partnerships. They’ve sealed their first-ever deal with a local broadcast network, Hearst-Argyle Television.
A spokesman for YouTube, a unit of Google, confirmed a Wall Street Journal story that YouTube will pay licensing fees for news, weather and entertainment videos from Hearst-Argyle member stations. It marks the first such payments for local broadcast TV stations by YouTube, the paper said.
Hearst-Argyle, which owns 29 local TV stations in the United States, will take an undisclosed cut of the advertising revenue YouTube earns when its users view clips of local TV stations owned by Hearst-Argyle, the spokesman said.
Hearst-Argyle of New York reaches roughly 18 percent of the television households in the United States.
It owns local stations affiliated with Walt Disney’s ABC, GE’s NBC, CBS Corp. and News Corp.’s MyNetworkTV broadcast TV networks.
If YouTube continues Google’s success in making almost all content creators potential AdSense publishers, I can foresee everyone becoming a potential YouTube partner within five years. Well, everyone except Viacom.
