Viacom and Yahoo! Prod Google

An all out gold rush is on between prospectors Google and Yahoo! The news today reveals another small victory for "old war horse" Yahoo!, as Viacom pens a deal to utilize the Yahoo Panama marketing system. With MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, ComedyCentral.com and BET.com in tow Viacom has clearly entered the Yahoo! camp.

Viacom and Yahoo! also pointed out the potential for expanding ties to include Viacom's other 140 sites. Viacom currently has a suit against Google for $1 billion over alleged copyright infringement, and this latest news seems like a little more than a jab at Google as suggested by a Yahoo! News article by Jennifer LeClaire of newsfactor.com.

Viacom has approximately 90 million unique viewers across their far reaching web properties. Yahoo! executives must to be yelling and stomping the floor over this veritable coup, and given some of Google's latest "banana peel" slippages number two Yahoo! must be seeing Google's taillights by now.

Some experts think that Viacom is trying to "stick it" to Google because of the YouTube case, but then that is not fodder for high dollar analysts is it? I think what we are witnessing on Web 2.0 is a 2007 version of the California gold rush for ad dollars. It seems like the bigger the pot gets, the more aggressive the parties involved become. What staggering numbers we continue to see, 90 million of this and 100 million of that.

There's gold in them hills, and Yahoo! just hit another strike, who will unearth the next nugget?