Yahoo and Facebook have formed a web advertising alliance and settled their high-profile patent dispute. 

The companies have signed an agreement that grants access to each others’ patent portfolios and establishes an advertising and content sharing partnership. 

No money changed hands but the ad alliance could work to their mutual benefit, as the two companies plan to display ads on each other’s sites. This will help Yahoo recover some its ad revenue while Facebook will get the chance to show its ads in areas other than its own website. 

The truce marks an end to a conflict provoked by Scott Thompson, Yahoo’s short-lived CEO, who resigned after failing to correct misinformation about his academic record in his biography. 

Yahoo sued Facebook in March for alleged patent infringements of a number of technologies, including ones related to social networking, advertising and site customisation. 

Facebook fired back with its own accusations of patent infringement in April. It claimed that Yahoo had violated 10 of the social networking giant’s patents, including display advertising, content personalisation and photo sharing. 

The new agreement could see the integration of Facebook’s social sharing features into Yahoo’s coverage of events, such as the Olympics, according to analysts. 

Hearings in the patent cases had been set to start later this month. 

Posted by

Smarayda Christoforou