Major Newspaper Groups Form Joint Local Online Advertising Group
Duncan Riley
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Four leading US newspaper companies are to announce a new joint company today to sell targeted local online advertising on their respective sites.
The Tribune Company, the Gannett Company, the Hearst Corporation and The New York Times Company will jointly own quadrantONE, with a base in Chicago that will employ 17 people.
According to the NY Times, advertising space will be sold in papers including The Los Angeles Times, The Des Moines Register, The Houston Chronicle and The Boston Globe. However titles considered to be not local will not be included in the deal, including USA Today, The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune.
The new company is said to be focused on offering advertisers scale in ad buys, with the newspaper companies themselves maintaining control. The move comes as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all target online mainstream media news sites, and it would appear that in part the move is also a reaction to that, with Lincoln Millstein from Hearst Newspapers saying simply “We want to control our own destiny.”
The combined reach of quadrantONE’s partner sites will be 50 million unique visitors a month.
Old media (The New York Times) vs New Media (Google ). I think Google will win.
I initially thought that these newspapers group had some sorts of arrangement with google to sell ads space.
the fact that they are doing it only for local newspapers won’t prevent them from extending the scheme to national newpapers ( which are part of google print ads network ) later on.
I wonder what Google has to say about this and what it’s going to do.
JD
http://www.myaboo.com/
I thought these newspapers had a deal with Yahoo for selling display ads.
I don’t think you guys really understand the industry you often write about. AOL/Quigo has a dominant position with newspapers/media companies. Yahoo serves very few ads on either newspaper or media sites by comparison. I believe you can still say the same about MSN.
http://www.i-guide.ro/blog/Ro/en/
anybody that is in online business, knows this is huge….
As my daughter would say “whatever”.
I strongly doubt national advertisers and their agencies will care much about this. It’s yet another “network” cobbled together to sell literally the same thing.
Most online newspapers and TV station websites are willing to take ads from a half dozen networks that purport to represent them … Centro, Cox Cross Media, Tribune Interactive, IBS, WorldNow, Mediaspan, Yahoo consortium and so on.
A quote from Lincoln Millstein also is interesting. He was one of the folks who campaigned for closing the early New Century Network (NCN). Had NCN been “fixed” and/or given time — rather than abruptly closed, these folks might have had something. After all that was 1998.
It’s taken 10 years to re-create it?
About 10 years too late.
Everything old is new again. Real Cities 1998. quadrantONE 2008.
These guys should have owned an ad server years ago. Just like they learned how to monetize content in the offline world they will also need to learn how to monetize content in the online world.
Having acted in this movie before, I only hope they pull talent not currently paid by a newspaper firm. This is not huge…it’s desparate. Without a self-service exchange apparatus, QuadrantOne will fail miserably.
online mainstream media looks monumental that require small engagements in different fragment.