Yahoo Consortium beefs up group

By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor

Yahoo Inc. said that 94 more publications joined its newspaper consortium, bringing the total number of participants to 779.

New companies in the consortium include the Sun-Times News Group, which publishes the Chicago Sun-Times and a number of other suburban Chicago papers; Black Press; Stephens Media Group; Independent Newspapers and Yankton Media Inc.

The new members will be able to cross-sell recruitment ads on Yahoo’s HotJobs network and also add the forthcoming Yahoo Advertising Management Platform technology to their portfolios.

Member newspapers can also integrate Yahoo’s paid search technology across their sites and be able to distribute their content across multiple Yahoo properties.

AMP rolling out

Meantime, Yahoo said it expects to roll out AMP to its first newspaper users this summer.

The ad management software provides tools designed to allow consortium members to target ads to specific audiences, as well as to manage and package inventory from across the network.

Gail Provenzano, Yahoo’s senior director of operations at the consortium, said the search engine company began working on developing an ad-serving product early last year.

“As a part of the partnership, Yahoo was working on researching the next generation of ad-serving technology and putting together a marketplace,” she said. “We worked with the newspaper consortium to define what requirements they had as a part of using our ad platform technology.”

Once AMP is installed, Provenzano said newspapers can use the app to generate proposals and oversee display advertising, order entry, inventory management, creative management and reporting.

Yahoo will work with each newspaper to roll out the initial AMP sites but expects them to be self-sufficient after the initial training, Provenzano said.

Finally, Yahoo launched an online ad circular program that allows retailers to deliver personalized newspaper circulars directly to consumers based on their areas of interest.

Yahoo Circulars will be using content from ShopLocal, which converts local print promotions and Sunday circulars into online formats.