State of Local

According to paid.Content, Yahoo has added 17 new members to its newspaper consortium. Yahoo’s newspaper partners now include more than 400 dailies and 140 members. This appears to be the largest such consortium, but not the only one.  In fact, last month The Tribune and three of Yahoo’s members (Gannett, Hearst MediaNews Group and Cox Newspapers) talked openly about forming an online newspaper ad-sharing network while the Washington Post and the New York Times are also looking at combining with other papers. Yahoo’s consortium formed a year ago and forged a strategic partnership for online recruitment advertising through Yahoo’s HotJobs site and has since expanded to include common online advertising network distribution, online text ads, and content sharing between Yahoo! and consortium newspapers.  

Clearly these partnerships speak to the old adage of ‘keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer.’ Not so long ago the portals were seen a huge threat to the daily newspapers’ bottom line and now they’re partnering with Yahoo like crazy. Why? Perhaps it’s Yahoo’s ability to add cache and to help bring scale and attractiveness to advertisers? After all, if you can’t beat them you may as well join them.  Newspaper circulation numbers dropped 2.6% recently according the to Newspaper Association of America which has forced the industry’s hand. To combat the perception that papers provide less value to consumers, many in the industry are now combining online readers with their print-reading brethren to woo advertiser interest. The problem with this tactic is that advertisers have often deemed off-line readers less valuable. With all the consolidating and consortium-forming going on, the numbers may simply become too large for the advertisers to dismiss.