The New York Times has an interesting
story on how The Knoxville News Sentinel, and other papers, have teamed up with Yahoo! (YHOO) to sell ads in print and online and how the partnership worked – really well. In a two-week trial of the system, Terry Widener said revenues were “about a seventh of the amount she typically sells in an entire year.”
The partnership has two distinct advantages.
First, local advertisers can target users based on their browsing history, which helps decide which ads are relevant to the reader.
“One is a new ad system from Yahoo, currently installed at about 100 newspapers, that allows them to sell graphical ads on their sites that are aimed at specific audiences, like car buyers or sports enthusiasts. The system puts users into those groups based on the pages they visit online, a technique known as behavioral targeting.”
The other advantage of the partnership is the ability to advertise products and businesses on a local level.
“Between its print and online editions, The Ventura County Star, for example, reached about 56 percent of its local audience. With the addition of the Yahoo pages, it now reaches 85 percent of Ventura residents, and it can also tell advertisers that they can reach Yahoo’s audience in the larger Los Angeles market.”
This is just a small piece of good news for the newspaper business, but it shows there are still successful solutions to be found by those willing to find them.