News

B&N.com Replaces Amazon as Featured Bookseller on Yahoo!
Edward Nawotka -- 9/25/00
Most popular portal site on the Internet is now the "featured" online bookseller




Barnesandnoble.com has replaced Amazon.com as the "featured" online bookseller on Yahoo!, the most popular portal site on the Internet. Under the agreement, a link to BN.com will appear on book-related topic pages as well as on results pages for all book-related searches. On the Yahoo! Books Shopping site, BN.com is listed as the "Featured Merchant," though a link invites users to "compare prices with other Yahoo! merchants." Clicking this link takes a user to a page offering the choice of buying from BN.com as well as from AllDirect.com, Powells.com, 1bookstreet.com, consciousmedia.com and ecampus.com.

Three years ago, Amazon.-com signed a multimillion-dollar contract to become the featured bookseller on both Yahoo! and AOL. Earlier this year, citing the desire to limit its portal advertising deals to one, Amazon renewed the contract with AOL and allowed its deal with Yahoo! to expire, although Amazon remains the featured bookseller on Yahoo!'s U.K. site. The exact financial terms of BN. com's agreement with Yahoo! weren't disclosed, but a similar deal the company made with Microsoft Network in 1998 cost between $10 million and $20 million, Internet analysts estimated.

In a possible effort to compete directly with AOL, Yahoo! and BN.com also announced plans to launch co-branded free Internet service through Spinway, an Internet service provider in Sunnyvale, Calif. CD-ROMs containing the software required to log on to the service will be distributed through Barnes & Noble stores, replacing AOL's free CD-ROMs at the point-of-sale. The software will be available for download from BN.com and will be enclosed with BN.com orders.