The New York Daily News, the fifth-largest circulating newspaper in the US, has joined Yahoo’s newspaper alliance.
The consortium launched last November with Belo, Cox Newspapers and Hearst Newspapers as premier members, and membership has since tripled to include nearly 400 newspapers from 21 publishing groups. The Daily News, with a reported weekly online and print readership of 4.5 million, is the largest to join Yahoo’s year-old group.
Consortium partners use Yahoo’s HotJobs to amp up their job listings and send out local ads to a national audience. HotJobs has launched 160 newspaper co-branded sites to date, serving 377 newspapers. In return, Yahoo is allowed to sell national ads on individual newspaper sites.
“Yahoo and Yahoo HotJobs provide great products and tools, and a mutually beneficial business model for working with newspapers,” said Jennifer Mauer, director of communications for the New York Daily News. “The strategy is to get our advertisers’ messages in front of as many of the right users as possible, and Yahoo will help us do that.”
Newspapers like the NewYorkDailyNews, TheAtlantaJournal-Constitution and TheSanFranciscoChronicle have joined the Yahoo group in an attempt to combat the decline of print ad dollars. Print classified ad revenue, according to the Newspaper Association of America, has fallen 16.5% for the first half of 2007.
“The Daily News and other members of the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium are trying to make our Web products as effective and compelling and user friendly as possible for advertisers and consumers,” Mauer continued.
Five other publishers, responding to the same dropping numbers, have entered talks to form their own online alliance separate from Yahoo. Interested companies include Gannett Co. and Tribune Co., which co-owns CareerBuilder.com. Other publishers who may join the new group are Hearst, Media News Group and Cox.
Since joining with Yahoo, some alliance members have reported ad gains. Lee Enterprises, for example, posted a 50% increase in online ad sales this year. Newspapers have reported a 20.3% increase in overall online ad revenue for the first half of 2007.
Integration between The New York Daily News and Yahoo has not been completed yet, but the two companies are working on a timeline.
