If I am not mistaken, Yahoo News does not create its own content. Everyone I see on Yahoo News comes from another source. I think there is more value to keeping MSNBC than Yahoo News.

"It's run by the man many consider to have once made MSNBC.com what it is."

I'd like to meet just one of those many!

If Microsoft is smart they will also sell the Yahoo media group in Santa Monica (minus News & Info) to NBC. The acquisition would be good for NBC. Let's face it, only Bravo's online team has any clue. And their wins will never eclipse the disaster know as iVillage. Yahoo's media group would be a step up from what NBC has right now.

MSNBC is more successful than its cable counterpart? And what metric are you using to measure that? From my perspective, both properties are languishing well behind their CNN and FOX News competitors.

[siteanalytics.compete.com]

@DeltaGuy: Compete.com doesn't include subdomain metrics, so it's useless to measure msnbc.com which is located at msnbc.msn.com. (ComScore will show Yahoo is the most popular news site, followed by MSNBC.com, with CNN.com a very close third.)

@Search.Scientist: interesting you mention the Bravo folks. You mean the folks who bought TelevisionWithoutPity.com for a song after Yahoo dilly-dallied and let their agreement with them (which was so biased in Y!'s favor, and TWoP didn't even mind) expired? I agree. Bravo seems to actually "get it" and their acquisition of TWoP was brilliant. Y!'s loss of an easy, cheap buy on them is inexcusable and should have cost the head of at least the Entertainment GM. For a company that supposedly understands 'community', this was clearly hubris interfering with business.

@rex: Yeah, but since most people got to MSNBC.com to get to msnbc.msn.com it should still give us an accurate view of Visitors, Just not individual pages impressions, shouldn't it ?

Serious thoughts aside .. I feel that one thing attractive about Yahoo in the internet world is the name 'Yahoo' itself and maybe thats why i navigate to theire site so frequently !! Do others feel that way ? Just curious !

Hitwise News Website report: [www.drudgereport.com]

Yahoo News is number 1 with a 7.13% share
CNN is number 3 with a 3.66% share
MSNBC is number 4 with a 2.97% share
Fox News is number 9 with a 1.59% share

@willontech.com: Nope.

@rex: Ah, mea culpa then. However if NBC Universal is so eager to take over, they should be slightly alarmed by the fact that so much of MSNBC's traffic is being attracted through its MSN affiliation.

@DeltaGuy: Yes, if by "affiliation" you mean its placement on the homepage of msn.com, this is quite true -- it drives significant traffic for the site. (For the record, I was exec producer of msnbc.com until a few months ago. I spearheaded the purchase of Newsvine -- an interesting property to consider in all this.)

You missed the obvious (and far more likely) scenario: NBC holds Microsoft to their joint-venture agreement such that Yahoo! News rolls up under the MSNBC Network, which would include msnbc.com, Yahoo! News, Newsvine and TodayShow.com as separate brands and experiences.

Why would NBC buy out their stake when they could essentially double their online reach? NBC was eager to take over MSNBC-TV, and indeed they did. Microsoft was barely involved in cable anyway. But the online side is profitable and equally valued by both sides.

Yahoo! News may currently be the number one news site, but MSNBC.com isn't far behind and has lead in the past. The election season is likely to tip the balance again. The two are very different sites from a business perspective. MSNBC.com has a fairly large staff, but is well monetized. Yahoo! News has far fewer people because it focuses on content aggregation and is not as heavily monetized. Just compare the number of ads per page. Both, however, rely on traffic from their respective portals. Assuming both Yahoo! and MSN remain largely in tact, there is room for both extremely popular news experiences. It's unlikely either partner in MSNBC.com thinks they could do without 30 million uniques a month.

If you combine the wire contracts, work and sales forces of two of the top three general news sites (Compete, Alexa and Hitwise are not the industry standards for measuring this stuff), you get exactly what MS wants with the Yahoo! acquisition: Scale and cost savings. And NBC gets unimaginable reach with the roll-up. No other online news network (eh, CNN) could come close to competing.

Your insider sounds poorly informed--or perhaps a wishful thinker. I somehow doubt Mr. Moore is in better standing at MSN after leaving to a competitor than the folks who run MSNBC.com, which is a key part of Microsoft's MSN.