What Little I Know…

Yahoo! has updated their display ad options for its newspaper consortium, by adding behavioral and geo-targeting across its network of newspaper publisher sites.

Newspaper sales reps are able to sell behaviorally targeted ads on not only their own sites, but on any newspaper site belonging to the Yahoo! newspaper consortium. The targeting process is determined using 350 standard Yahoo! audience segments, as well as customized behavioral segments.

Currently, there are about 20 newspaper sites testing the cross-sales product and that number is expected to expand to 50 in a month’s time.

Yahoo!’s partnership with the newspaper consortium spans multiple initiatives, including Yahoo! HotJobs, the distribution of headlines across Yahoo!, the adoption of Yahoo! Search on newspaper sites, cross-selling of advertising, etc…. Yahoo!’s biggest success however, has been seen with their HotJobs product, which today serves more than 425 U.S. newspapers. HotJobs has experienced 50% year over year traffic growth and has become the fastest growing Web site among the leading job boards, surpassing Monster.com (source: ComScore Media Metrix).

“Yahoo!’s continued momentum with the newspaper industry shows that current and new Consortium members value the opportunity to combine the newspapers’ own unmatched local news and deep local advertising relationships with Yahoo!’s leading technologies and extensive online audience,” Lem Lloyd, vice president, Newspaper Consortium for Yahoo!, Inc.. Funny, just last month analyst from the street put it the other way around. Analysts speculated that Yahoo! was going to need the relationship with the newspapers consortium to grow an untapped and viable part of their business. Although, newspapers see Yahoo! as their online savior, in many ways Yahoo! sees the relationship as the only thing allowing them to appropriately target and get local enough to compete with the other search giants and targeted search firms such as Double Click and Value Click.

Being able to compete in the ad space is an imperative for Yahoo!, especially given its 2007 financial overview data.