Five of the biggest newspaper companies in the US, Gannett, Tribune, Hearst, Media News Group and Cox Newspapers, are looking at collaborating on a web advertising platform that would rival Yahoo and cover seven of the top 10 biggest ad markets in the US.
Newspaper groups are increasingly partnering on printing, call centres and delivery systems to save money, according to the Chicago Tribune, but it is clear where they see the greatest threat. "Relations between different newspaper companies have gotten easier as the adversity has gotten greater," said one executive.
Yahoo formed a partnership of 19 newspaper groups last year to support its HotJobs website, but Gannett and Tribune stayed out, looking to protect their own CareerBuilder rival. The new network would use one sales team to sell across the network of newspaper sites, which gave them more control than the Yahoo deal.
"Under the arrangement, the newspaper companies can offer advertisers space on Yahoo's chain of highly popular Web sites. Yahoo salespeople, in turn, can sell space across a national network of newspaper sites. What's missing is the ability for the newspaper companies to sell their own national ads across each other's sites. That means they share national ad revenue with Yahoo, which may or may not be aggressive about selling their space."
Source: Chicago Tribune
Technorati Tags: Cox, Gannett, Hearst, MediaNewsGroup, Tribune, Yahoo
