October 24, 2003

Primedia Inc. announced today that it has reached a search and contextual advertising agreement with Google Inc.

The deal includes a four-year distribution and revenue sharing agreement for PRIMEDIA's About.com as well as the sale of its Sprinks unit to Google. Sprinks is the pay per click advertising network, which serves About.com and numerous third party distribution partners. Financial terms were not disclosed.

As part of the deal, Google will become the exclusive provider of contextually targeted and search advertising across About.com, the Web's largest content site, and most of PRIMEDIA's Consumer Media and Magazines Group ("CMMG") websites. The deal extends the reach of Google's base of more than 150,000 advertisers to the targeted audiences served by About.com's 450 topic-specific Guide Sites that cover more than 10,000 topics and the CMMG 127 targeted magazine-related sites.

"Combined, the CMMG properties and About.com are among the largest providers of original content on the Internet today," said Dean Nelson, Chairman of PRIMEDIA. "Google's targeted advertising is a perfect match to our portfolio of high-quality content and large special interest audiences. Google's advertisers will benefit from this extended reach across a broad range of enthusiast-centric properties and on About.com's 450 Guide Sites and our users will benefit from relevant advertising."

"We realized early that contextual advertising had great potential across the Internet and on our content sites in particular. We partnered with Google because their vast base of advertisers will allow us to accelerate the benefits of contextual advertising across our Internet sites and enable us to more effectively monetize our website traffic than we could with Sprinks alone," said Mr. Nelson.

Source: PR Newswire

        

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