I just read a very interesting post at the NYT Bits blog, that reveals (at least to me) that there is much more in the deal between the Newspaper Consortium (NPC in the blog post) and Yahoo! that at least i knew / thought).
I had filed this deal as a collaboration in the classified area (mainly hotjobs). But the following quotes show that:
- The newspapers
soldoutsourced advertising, their core business model, to Yahoo! - That there is no lack of irony (to put it mildly) that the newspapers finally resort to an outsider to build the last incarnation of the “New Century Network”, the ad network
- Yahoo is going head to head with Doubleclick and aQuantive
- Things in this area after a MSFT-YHOO merger are really getting interesting
- I’m much more closely trying to figure out who is doing / going to do behavioural targeting (which is not ok for me personally) and who is only doing contextual targeting (which is ok for me personally).
- Right now ihave the impression that Google is more conservative wrt. behavioural targeting that Yahoo and others. They know that behavioural targeting risks loosing the trust of the users (the most important asset they have).
But now the quotes (Highlighting by me)
Saul Hansell (NYT):
The more than 600 newspapers in Yahoo’s consortium have all agreed to switch to new ad serving software from Yahoo. Yahoo, of course, has been one of the biggest ad servers for its own sites, but it has not offered software to other publishers before.
…
The behavioral targeting ambitions can be seen in a different deal that Yahoo cut last year with WebMD last fall. Under this scenario, users who visit WebMD will be tagged, presumably through a cookie on their browsers. Later, when those users visit Yahoo properties, they can be shown ads that are sold by WebMD (rather than Yahoo). Since WebMD knows what conditions they are interested in and has relationships with health care companies interested in people with those conditions, it presumably can sell the ads for more money than Yahoo could.
These deals are interesting because they are the reverse of the typical advertising network arrangements in which networks buy the unsold pages from publishers at low rates. Here Yahoo is giving some of its pages to publishers to sell high rates, presumably because they have data about users and relationships with advertisers.
Diana Wong (Yahoo):
Yes, we have all of the basic ad management and ad serving capabilities of DART (DFA and DFP), plus the ability to target and cross-sell and run campaigns across the network, plus major leaps in ease of use and removal of friction.
As a reminder, the NPC basically expected us to provide them a replacement for DART. Their reaction is that we have significantly over delivered on their expectations by fundamentally making basic advertising and publishing easier and more effective.
More on the Yahoo / Newspaper Consortium / MSFT-YHOO issue
Yahoo Expands Newspaper Consortium; Now Up To 634 Papers
…Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) has announced the addition of four publishers to its growing newspaper consortium. The new additions are Shaw Newspapers, The Buffalo News, The Times Publishing Company, and The Columbian Publishing Company. With the additions, the total number of participating papers, Yahoo claims, is up to 634, 425 of which are daily. The an…
Irony is dead, last gasp of newspaper industry edition
…Yahoo and Microsoft… The companies were also all part of the New Century Network in the late 1990s… Source: New York Times. March 1998: [W]hen New Century Network was kicked off last April by nine [newspaper] giants teaming up to conquer electronic competition, even the launch party bombed… In a ballroom at the Newspaper Associati…
Silicon Valley after a Microsoft/Yahoo merger: a contrarian view
…Yahoo merger. Instead, let’s just assume for the moment that Microsoft succeeds in its bid for Yahoo. What would a Microsoft/Yahoo merger mean for startups in Silicon Valley? Some smart people whom I respect a great deal believe that a Microsoft/Yahoo merger would be bad for Silicon Valley startups. Says Bill Burnham, for example: &q…
MSFT-YHOO: Special Newspaper Consortium Edition
…Yahoo‘s been piling up its own set of endorsements from newspapers over the last year. It has convinced newspaper chains of two things: 1) they needed a big brother with a big network of readers and the latest in search/ad technology; 2) that big brother is Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO). With the newly ascendant Dean Singleton leading the charge, a core gr…
How Microsoft could destroy Yahoo (and itself)
…Yahoo takeover. I’m interested in how Microsoft may be faced with a choice: Change who you are in a very fundamental way, or destroy both Yahoo and yourself in the process. That is the very choice facing newspapers today, and we might learn something by considering how this takeover might play out. Why does Microsoft want Yahoo, anyway? Here’s…
Hitting the coffin nail on the head for newspapers
…newspapers had 44.1% of the local online-ad market. (Directories such as the Yellow Pages have 10.1%, and local television outlets 9.3%.) Local media companies, because they are based in the communities they serve, would seem to have an edge over Internet sellers when it comes to persuading the diner or corner hardware store to take out an ad. B…