Yahoo announced today an exclusive partnership with Bebo to manage display advertising on the social networking web site in Ireland and Britain, giving it access to more than 11 million sought-after users.
The two groups said under the agreement Yahoo would sell the majority of the display and video advertising on Bebo, the UK and Ireland's most popular social networking site.
The site has an estimated 11.6 million users in the two countries and 38 million users worldwide. Joanna Shields, president of Bebo International, said she would be keen to expand the agreement globally.
"We think this is a groundbreaking move in the online advertising industry in the UK and Ireland," Toby Coppel, managing director of Yahoo Europe, said.
"It's a core step for us in building up the largest and most effective advertising network. It's a big deal." The deal marks further momentum in Yahoo's campaign to add other major web sites to its ad network instead of the rival networks of Google and Microsoft.
Financial terms were not disclosed and the length of the agreement was described as multi-year. Under the agreement, Yahoo will also integrate the community-driven knowledge service Yahoo Answers into the Bebo site and provide a new Bebo toolbar that allows users to monitor their social network when they are not on the site.
The two groups said advertisers would benefit from the combination of Bebo's highly engaged audience with Yahoo's insight and ability to target consumers.
Social networking sites such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace are hugely popular with younger Web users - an important yet hard-to-reach category for advertisers - but media groups have struggled to convert their soaring popularity into revenue.