Overture expands United Online deal

Overture Services Inc has expanded its relationship with United Online Inc, the budget consumer ISP, to allow access to millions of new subscribers, the companies said yesterday.

Overture, which already provides its advertising/search engine to NetZero, will, from May, provide its pay-per-performance text ads to Juno, United's other brand. Juno and NetZero combines have 5.6 million subscribers, 1.45 million of which take billable services.

But Overture declined to comment on ongoing talks aimed at renewing its contract with America Online Inc, one of its biggest customers. The companies have set a deadline of this Wednesday to come to an agreement on their revenue-sharing arrangement.

Overture gets about 40% of its revenue from its portal partners, but faces new competition from companies such as Google Inc, which has won at least one customer from it recently. Losing AOL would have a noticeably financial impact on the firm, and has been the subject of much investor concern of late.

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