Yahoo is buying news aggregator BuzzTracker (Kara Swisher reports for $5 million). Yahoo sees the acquisition improving and expanding its news coverage in a number of ways. BuzzTracker founder Alan Warms becomes GM of Yahoo News.

Warms’ decision to sell to Yahoo, as reported on the Participate Media blog was largely about monetization and scale:

The decision to sell the business and move to Yahoo! was relatively simple. As anyone playing in the online space understands, online media is all about scale. The ability to garner real CPMs, the ability to sell ads directly, the ability to provide innovative solutions to advertisers, all depend on having tens of millions of unique visitors.

BuzzTracker covers a mix of traditional news outlets and blogs and will augment Yahoo’s more traditional news approach. Yahoo News is the leading online news destination in the U.S. according to comScore.

Here’s related coverage of the differences between traditional news and user-generated news sites.

Related Topics: Yahoo: Business Issues | Yahoo: News

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling