Anybody have thoughts on Yahoo/Newspaper Partnerships?

[MediaSalesPro]

Yahoo partners with newspapers
DEAL AIMS TO WIN BACK AD REVENUE
By Pete Carey and Elise Ackerman
Mercury News
Yahoo announced a partnership with a consortium of more than 150 newspapers Sunday, including the Mercury News, in a move to strengthen the Sunnyvale Web giant's local presence across the nation while giving papers a way to recapture advertising revenue that has shifted to the Internet.

The consortium, put together by MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton and Hearst CEO Victor Ganzi, is made up of MediaNews, which owns this and other Bay Area papers; Hearst, publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle and other papers; and the newspaper companies Belo, Cox Newspapers, Journal Register, Lee Enterprises and E.W. Scripps. Other newspaper companies are expected to join later.

The deal marks the first time American newspapers have joined forces in a broad partnership with a global Internet company. Singleton and Ganzi released a joint statement calling the new, multi-year arrangement ``a transformational deal for the newspaper industry.''

The consortium's members publish 176 newspapers in 38 states with a paid circulation of 12 million and Web sites drawing 58 million monthly visitors. Yahoo attracts 130 million monthly visitors.

Yahoo and the newspaper companies described the agreement as a collaboration that will allow each to capture revenue from a rapidly expanding Internet advertising market. Yahoo will gain local depth, and local newspapers will get access to a national audience while improving their home pages with Yahoo's Internet features and technology.

Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said the deal will allow his company to tap the newspapers' local markets and ``expand local engagement and subsequently grow local advertising.''

Various news and advertising features will be rolled out in the coming months, beginning in December when the newspapers' online jobs pages will carry the Yahoo HotJobs co-brand. Under this deal, newspapers will be able to offer their customers the opportunity to also place their recruitment ads on HotJobs, which has 28 million registered job seekers and hundreds of thousands of job listings searchable by location.

The Mercury News and Contra Costa Times will launch HotJobs Dec. 8. All other MediaNews Group papers in the Bay Area already have it.

Hilary Schneider, a Yahoo senior vice president, said the partnership would provide Yahoo HotJobs ``with an enormous database of additional job listings.''

In time, the Web sites of consortium members, such as MercuryNews.com, will add Yahoo search tools, maps, event listings and other features. Their news content and archived news stories will be distributed throughout the Yahoo network.

Analysts said the partnership appeared to be much broader and more significant than Google's agreement to resell advertising space for 50 newspapers announced earlier this month.

Sasa Zorovic, of Oppenheimer Co., said the deal could provide a valuable boost to the Internet industry's largest underachiever. Yahoo's share price has fallen 38 percent this year as worries about its ability to compete with Google and Microsoft have mounted.

``One of the things that has set Yahoo back is the lack of partnerships,'' Zorovic said. While Google has deals with News Corp., owner of MySpace, the largest social networking site, and AOL, and Microsoft's MSN provides advertising services to Facebook, the second-largest social networking site, investors were concerned that Yahoo was getting left out, Zorovic said.

The Internet company clearly hopes the arrangement will give it a leg up in the rapidly evolving system of delivering local and national news to online readers, and providing online advertising with a wider reach to local businesses.

The newspaper companies see the agreement as a pathway to the online newspaper of the future, recapturing revenue that has been lost to online job sites and significantly improving their local home pages.

``We will be selling many things we never had to sell before,'' Singleton said Sunday, ``and Yahoo will be selling content they never had to sell before.''

Online advertising is expected to dramatically increase in the future, with the companies pointing to a Bank of America study estimating growth from $3.4 billion this year to $12.4 billion by 2010.

``This is the model we believe will allow newspapers to gain the lion's share of that growth in our local markets,'' Singleton said.

Singleton said combining with Yahoo on job listings will give both companies ``the quickest revenue boost,'' but that five years from now he expects selling ads around Web searches and news to be the biggest revenue source. ``This is a partnership. We're getting married. We don't know exactly what the Web is going to look like in a few years. We just know we're going to do it with Yahoo.''

The newspaper deal will give Yahoo the chance to place ads before an estimated 58 million online newspaper readers in 13 of the top 15 national markets, including San Francisco, Philadelphia, Dallas and Atlanta.

Greg Sterling, of Sterling Market Intelligence, said the partnership could help newspapers who are struggling to sell advertising online. Some of the largest newspaper advertisers prefer search engines and portals like Yahoo on the Web as a way of connecting with online readers.

The new partnership is an expansion of an existing relationship Yahoo has with MediaNews and Belo, and is the outgrowth of a year of negotiations initiated by Singleton.

``It basically gives us a road map for the newspaper of the future online,'' Singleton said. ``Obviously we're going to be printing papers for a long, long time, too.''


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[db7]

General impression positive, but the devil is in the details. More info on the financials is needed. Rates, margins, % split of profits. Anyone know how this is structured?

[ladotcom]

I work for the Los Angeles Newspaper Group and have known about this deal for awhile now. Not sure how the percentages will break out but I know that the executive management team is very excited about the revenue opportunities that this will create.

[FishWrapAutoRep]

our newspaper help wanted ads are now put on yahoo "hot jobs"....seems to be going well...one downfall, help wanted ads are not staying as long as they used to in the paper...