• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, December 14, 2006

ABC News has become Yahoo News' main video content provider, the companies said Wednesday. Expanding on their year-old revenue-sharing partnership, ABC News will double the amount of content it contributes to Yahoo News, including breaking news clips as well as segments from "Good Morning America" and "20/20."

"The partnership is a strong driver of traffic and exposes our product to a different and larger audience," said Bernard Gershon, senior vice president and general manager of ABC News digital group.

Gershon said the new deal ensures premium placement of ABC News content on Yahoo News. "The phrase we're using is premier, which means that when you go to the Yahoo News page and there's a video news story, it's most likely going to be ABC news content."

Yahoo News will continue to feature content from dozens of other news outlets, including the Associated Press and Reuters, accompanied by its news search tool, which taps into over 8,000 other news sources.

This week's deal expands on a relationship reached between ABC and Yahoo in September 2005. The companies will continue to share the revenue generated from the ads that Yahoo sells alongside ABC's content. Neither company would say how the new multi-year deal will affect their existing revenue-sharing agreement.

Amid intense competition, Yahoo News has managed to remain the most popular news site on the Internet. The site averaged 10.3 million unique visitors for the week ending Nov. 26, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

In addition, video streams on Yahoo News have increased more than tenfold over the past year, according to Scott Moore, Yahoo's head of news and information.

Along with its Yahoo partnership, ABC News maintains ongoing content-sharing deals with AOL, Comcast, and Verizon.

This week, ABCNews.com debuted a video blog hosted by Amanda Congdon, the former face of independent video blog Rocketboom. However, there are no plans to make Congdon's vlog available on Yahoo News, said Gershon.