Yahoo! Partners With Citadel Radio Stations

Yahoo! said on Monday that it had struck an agreement to stream the signals of 140 Citadel Broadcasting radio stations online, bringing a total of 450 radio stations hosted by the popular Web portal.

Financial terms of the agreement between Yahoo! and Citadel were not disclosed.

Yahoo! said it is using proprietary technology to digitally insert ads into the streams to replace those in the broadcast signal. "We have created an in-house solution that opens up millions of hours of new advertising units, providing an entirely new revenues source for Yahoo! and our radio partners," said Marc Montoya, senior director, Yahoo! Radio and Television.

Montoya pointed out that inserting advertisements was not a difficult technological feat, and clearly something that’s been done for decades in radio and television. While Montoya maintained advertising on genre-specific radio stations was already an attractive targeted feature, he did not elaborate to say if any further targeting of demographic-specific advertising could be accomplished by Yahoo!’s technology.

The insertion of Internet-only ads has become significant recently due to an ongoing debate regarding the rights of radio talent group, AFTRA, whose members request further compensation for repurposed online broadcasts.

Citadel owns about 200 radio stations and boasts it is the sixth-largest U.S. radio broadcaster when ranked by yearly revenue. Citadel controls stations in markets including Buffalo, N.Y., Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City and Providence, R.I.