Yahoo charges for AP archive access
The Web portal begins selling articles from the Associated Press' archive on its news site, in its latest step to diversify its revenue.
An agreement will allow Yahoo to sell AP articles dating back to Jan. 1, 1998. The articles, priced at $1.50 each, will reside as search results on Yahoo News below the site's free standard-search results. This does not mean Yahoo will charge for all AP content. The wire service will continue to offer headlines, photos, roundups and multimedia clips free of charge on Yahoo for the first 15 days after publication before moving them to the paid archive.
Financial details of the agreement were not released.
The deal, announced Tuesday, underscores Yahoo's ongoing attempt to charge visitors for certain premium services on its site. For the past year, Yahoo has increased efforts to boost the number of paid subscribers to help fill a revenue void left by the collapse of online advertising in 2001.
Last week, Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said that the company will report more than 2 million paid subscribers by the end of the calendar year. Company executives have highlighted strong growth in certain premium services such as e-mail forwarding, personals, data storage and a DSL (digital subscriber line) service with SBC Communications.
Yahoo's Semel added that the company expects its "marketing services" revenue--comprising online advertising, sponsored search results from a deal with Overture, and other promotions--to jump 20 percent in 2003. Most of this growth is expected to come from the Overture partnership, which pays Yahoo a fee every time a person clicks on its commercial search listings.
This is not the first time Yahoo has begun charging for archived news headlines. Yahoo and The New York Times struck a similar deal in May. Times articles cost more at $2.95 each.