By: Karl Greenberg Free Web Access May Help Advertisers Draw Audience
Adweek IQ In an
alliance
with Santa Clara, Calif.-based portal Yahoo! Inc., Spinway Inc., a free
Internet service provider (ISP), began on Tuesday to provide dial-up
Internet access and customer support for Yahoo! Fusion Marketing clients
who sponsor a free-to-user ISP.
For its part, Yahoo! will be Spinway's start-page and content provider.
Spinway's co-branded ISPs will feature My Yahoo! content, Yahoo! Mail,
Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Player and Yahoo! Companion. Terms of the pact
call for Yahoo! to represent certain advertising inventory on Spinway's
network. Of about 3500 Yahoo! Fusion Marketing clients, only Spiegel and
BlueLight/Kmart have tapped Spinway to develop branded free ISP's, but
others are expected.
Spinway, 6-months-old, launched the Kmart-branded BlueLight ISP last
December and Spiegel Catalogue Inc.'s (Spiegel.com) free ISP last May in
partnership with Yahoo!. 'Today we are formalizing that relationship,' said
Susan Hense, Spinway marketing director.
Drew Lanham, Yahoo! senior director of business development, said free ISPs
are a good fit for the company's Fusion Marketing program, designed to help
companies 'find an audience, connect with anyone and sell anything online.
The free ISP program does all of that and more. It's a very cost effective
user-acquisition vehicle. Clients are able to find an audience, leverage
their brick and mortar resources to drive customers to their online
resource.'
Several newspaper Web sites around the country are offering free Internet
access through third parties, including The Dallas Morning News and
Denver Rocky Mountain News. Those papers are using 1stUp.com, a
subsidiary of CMGI.
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