• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, April 12, 2006

Dow Jones & Company has chosen Kanoodle as the exclusive provider of sponsored ad links across its influential Web properties, including The Wall Street Journal Online, the companies said Tuesday. Under terms of the multi-year deal, Kanoodle will provide sponsored links on the content pages of Dow Jones' sites. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The deal is actually an expansion of Kanoodle's relationship with Dow's MarketWatch.com, which started three years ago. "Kanoodle has consistently outperformed for us on MarketWatch.com in terms of relevancy, client services, and revenue generation," said Randy Kilgore, senior vice president of advertising, Dow Jones Online, Dow Jones & Company.

Other Dow Jones properties include CareerJournal.com, OpinionJournal.com, StartupJournal.com, RealEstateJournal.com, CollegeJournal.com, and Barron's Online.

The deal is the latest in a string of recent partnership wins for Kanoodle. In February, the company signed a distribution agreement with MSN, providing content-targeted sponsored links to MSN Spaces. Kanoodle also recently replaced rival Google on CBS sites, and rival Yahoo on Turner/Nascar sites.

Additionally, Kanoodle's exclusive partnership with Dow Jones displaces Yahoo's sponsored link network, which is losing its place on The Wall Street Journal Online.

A Yahoo spokeswoman reached by phone had no comment regarding Kanoodle's latest client.

Kanoodle touts itself as having a more neutral relationship with Web publishers than Google or Yahoo, both of which compete directly with many content providers--the Journal in particular. "We're not looking to compete with our partners," said Kanoodle CEO Lance Podell.

And while Google--and to a lesser degree, Yahoo--still dominate the sponsored link business, at least one analyst followed Podell's logic. "There's a perception now with publishers that 'I'm subsidizing my competitor' when you're working with Google and Yahoo," said search analyst Greg Sterling. "I do think that those arguments are persuasive to many publishers, and companies like Kanoodle are successfully using it to their advantage."