Alas- the final piece of the puzzle. The final BIG piece at least.
Yahoo! has signed Gannett to join their “you sell” program. This means they get to have yet another massive localized salesforce selling their inventory. They already have partnerships in place with every other major newspaper holding company in the country (Cox, Belo, Hearst, McClatchy, etc.) as part of the Newspaper Consortium so this deal with Gannett- probably the most notable of the news giants- is the icing on the cake.
Yahoo also gets more local content. Lots of it. Gannett has 81 publications including USA Today, The Arizona Republic, The Indianapolis Star, Detroit Free Press, and The Burlington Free Press (my hometown paper so I had to mention it). This deal, together with the NC and the recent acquisition of Associated Content, serves to further extend Yahoo’s dominance as the internet’s #1 provider of premium content.
BTW: I define premium content as: a.) non-user-generated content (ie not Facebook and Twitter), b.) brand-safe content (ie websites where marketers feel 100% comfortable running their ads), or c.) both. Newspapers have a lot of both so they are highly valuable to national advertisers as well as local advertisers.
In return, Gannett gets to leverage the APT from Yahoo! ad platform- a next generation adserver and ad exchange- and tap into Yahoo’s local inventory and behavioral data to use as sales extension. According to the MediaWeek article- “With Yahoo, Gannett, which plans to use the targeting and ad ordering capabilities of the APT platform from Yahoo for local sales, said its local market digital reach would be as high as 80 percent.”
Great moves for both media giants!
It really is an interesting move, considering that the buzz around the Yahoo newspaper consortium certainly has cooled. This certainly gives it a boost.
One small comment – I would consider Advance Internet as a notable newspaper company that didn’t join the Yahoo program.