The company will begin sharing traffic, content and promotions with the website for "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," starting Tuesday. AOL sites such as KitchenDaily.com and Popeater will promote DeGeneres and provide links to her site, and vice versa.
No money is changing hands. The company that produces the TV show, Telepictures Productions, will still have control over what appears on the show's site and will sell the ad space next to it.
The deal is part of a strategy at AOL Inc. of hitching itself to established brands that complement its own original content. That, AOL hopes, will help it replace revenue from its shrinking dial-up Internet business with online advertising sales.
In a similar arrangement, AOL launched a new site this summer called Cambio with the Jonas Brothers, the famed Disney trio. The company says it expects more deals along these lines this fall.
Telepictures Productions is a unit of Time Warner Inc., which spun off AOL into a separate company last year.
