Yahoo's Newspaper Consortium Keeps Growing

Even as Google is cancelling its experiment with newspaper advertising, Yahoo is expanding its newspaper consortium. Today, Yahoo is announcing that it is adding two new members: The Boston Globe and the St. Petersburg Times. That brings the consortium up to 38 media companies, representing 793 total newspapers, up from 635 newspaper partners a year ago, and 176 at launch in November, 2006

Yahoo’s newspaper strategy has seen success because, unlike Google, it never tried to get into the business of selling print ads. Instead, Yahoo focused on helping newspapers get more traffic to their Websites. One way it does this is by showing article headlines from partner newspapers across Yahoo-owned properties, including the home page, Yahoo News, and Yahoo Mobile. Over the past year and a half, these links have delivered 200 million clicks or views to the partner newspaper sites, including some that have reached a million views for an individual story, such as this one about puppies saving a three-year old. (Puppies sell newspapers).

HotJobs is being used by 600 of those newspaper Webistes. And Yahoo also helps 120 of the newspapers with online ad management, through its Apt ad management system, which allows the newspapers to tap into Yahoo’s advertising inventory when they cannot sell the the inventory themselves. This won’t save the newspaper industry, but at least it is a bright spot. Or is Yahoo simply taking share in a dying business?