Although officials with one of the Internet's leading portals are remaining tightlipped, many of America's professional sports leagues are flexing their muscles. In the last month the NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB and the PGA have asked Yahoo.com to pull gambling-related advertisements from sections of its site.
In the last week alone the NFL and the PGA requested that ads be pulled for sportsbooks and online casinos which were placed on the Yahoo! Inc. sports site where the leagues had been providing content.
A spokesperson for Yahoo said yesterday that the ads had been moved to other areas of the Yahoo portal where the leagues are not providing content.
Officials with the PGA didn't return calls from IGN, while a spokesperson with the NFL would not comment on the matter.
The issue started earlier this month when Yahoo, facing sagging revenues and bottoming stock prices,
bucked its own trend and started accepting advertisements for online casinos and sports books. The ads
started running on Dec. 1, and officials with the NFL's legal office noticed the ads a week later. Calls were
quickly made to Yahoo asking them to pull the ads. The NFL, along with every other major sports league in the country, has been adamantly opposed to gambling on sporting events.
In a statement to IGN, Yahoo admitted that the ads were pulled in part to salvage the relationship it had with the NFL: "We certainly value our current relationship with the NFL, as well as any future relationship with them, and understand their sensitivities. We have prevented these gaming-related ads from appearing on any pages containing NFL-supplied content."
NFL.com, the league's official site, supplies a limited amount of content for Yahoo's NFL section. Currently, NFL.com is produced and operated by Disney's sports branch, ESPN.com. That contract is up in April, and Yahoo is among the contenders seeking approval from the league to take over the operations for the league's site.
Most recently, the PGA Tour asked Yahoo to remove advertisements for online sports bookmakers on golf pages, becoming the fifth U.S. sports league or organization to make such a demand.
The sports-related gambling ads generated $4 million this month in sales, media executives said, at a time when Yahoo sales growth is slowing.
Yahoo has similar content agreements with the NBA, MLB, NHL and the NBA. It is currently seeking to extend those agreements.
Advertising produced about 90 percent of Yahoo's $588.6 million in sales in 1999, and last quarter growth slowed from a pace that more than doubled revenue each of the past four years. Yahoo ranked second to America Online's AOL Network with 56.5 million visitors in October, according to Jupiter Media Metrix's most recent statistics.