Newspaper & Mailroom
Yahoo! Welcomes Freedom Communications, North Jersey Media Group and The San Diego Union-Tribune to Newspaper Consortium
Wednesday 17. June 2009 - Membership Increases as Newspapers Deliver Local Online Results From Yahoo! Partnership
Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO) today announced that five newspapers — Freedom Communications flagship newspaper, Orange County (Calif.) Register and The Gazette in Colorado Springs, Colo.; the North Jersey Media Groups The Record and Herald News; and The San Diego Union-Tribune. — have joined the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium. Since launching in November 2006 with 176 newspapers, Yahoo!s industry-leading partnership with Americas local newspapers has more than quadrupled in size to 814 newspapers accounting for 51% of all Sunday circulation.1
The Consortium has helped participating newspapers increase their share of online ad spend in the growing local online ad market by leveraging Yahoo!’s advertising platform technology, massive audience reach and highly engaged community.2 It also has enabled the newspapers’ sales forces to sell Yahoo! targeted ads to their local clients.
“The Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium provides exciting opportunities to enhance the accessibility and usefulness of Freedoms Web sites for visitors and advertisers,” said Douglas S. Bennett, president, Freedom Interactive. “Through this alliance, we offer our advertising customers a very sophisticated level of targeting by demographics, interest categories and ZIP code-level geography, which will lead to even more impact and returns from their advertising investments.”
“Our site, NorthJersey.com, is the top local news site in the North Jersey region with about one million local and national unique visitors monthly,” said Stephen A. Borg, president and publisher, North Jersey Media Group. “We look forward to taking full advantage of Yahoo!’s capacity to expand our online reach even further, and were especially interested in the growth opportunities from Yahoo!’s behavioral targeting capabilities.”
“The partnership between the Union-Tribune and Yahoo! will allow us to provide our advertising partners with increased online reach and opportunities for behavioral targeting,” said Ed Moss, president and publisher, The San Diego Union-Tribune. “The combination of SignOnSanDiego.com with Yahoo!s robust network and data capabilities, will allow us to offer advertising packages that can reach 83 percent of the San Diego market.”
The Newspaper Consortium initially focused on providing its original 176 member newspapers with a powerful local and national recruitment network through Yahoo! HotJobs. It has since expanded to include search, content distribution and sales partnerships. Currently:
592 newspapers have selected Yahoo! HotJobs as their exclusive online recruitment solution;
288 newspaper sites have launched Yahoo!s core search products: contextual-advertising, paid-search, and web search;
350 newspapers now receive more than 23 million referrals a month from the distribution of news headlines across the Yahoo! network and through its services, including Yahoo! Front Page, Yahoo! News, and Yahoo! Finance, as well as across Yahoo! Mobile and on Yahoo! Messenger;
More than 160 newspapers are now live on APT from Yahoo!, Yahoo!s ad management platform, since its launch in September 2008 with two pilot newspapers;
More than 4,000 newspaper sales representatives have participated in sales training sessions provided by Yahoo!.
Member newspapers, large and small, have been delivering results. The Consortiums top sales performers include The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which, combined with Yahoo!, increased its online audience reach in Atlanta from 15 percent to 80 percent, and the New York Daily News, which continues to see a steady growth in traffic to its site from sharing its content with Yahoo!. In addition, small- to medium-sized newspapers, such as The Evansville Courier Press in Evansville, Ind., have broken the myth that ad sales are tied to circulation. It recently sold $1.1 million of Yahoo! targeted ads during a one-week sales blitz.
“Selling targeted and measurable advertising campaigns to local businesses is really delivering results for our newspaper partners,” said Lem Lloyd, vice president, U.S. Partnerships, Yahoo! Inc. “With more and more local advertisers shifting dollars from traditional media to online, local advertising is a great growth opportunity for the newspaper industry.”