The Weather Channel and Pulse 360 (formerly Kanoodle) today jointly announced an exclusive multi-year agreement resulting in the launch of Pulse 360’s sponsored links on Weather.com (and its 25 million monthly users).
Pulse 360 links do not pass link juice, and are more like the physical set up of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network, without the enhanced contextual targeting.
An interesting note is that Weather.com is a Yahoo Search partner, so Yahoo provides search results and sponsored search links on Weather.com, but Pulse 360 is servings its contextual link ads. So why isn’t Weather.com serving YPN ads?
It’s my understanding that Yahoo’s relationship with Weather.com is totally search distribution oriented, but one defining reason may be that Pulse 360 offers video advertising text ad units, and serving them via Weather.com videos is an obvious fit, adding a new video monetization tool for Weather.com.
Pulse 360 says the launch of its sponsored links on Weather.com increases the Pulse 360 premium network to more than 6 billion impressions per month.
Sites which serve Pulse 360’s link ads include msnbc.com, the sites of the Wall Street Journal Online Network, including WSJ.com, Marketwatch.com and Barrons.com, the sites of the CBS Television Stations Group, NASCAR.com, USATODAY.com, IMDB.com, FOXSports.com and FOX.com.
