Several top US newspaper publishers will devote online advertising space to a new network that wants to make it easier to place ads on hundreds of newspapers' websites at a time, says a Reuters report. The network, quadrantONE, said it will get space from 138 sites and represent more than 250 newspapers.
Publishers joining the network include AH Belo Corp, McClatchy Co, Media General Inc and EW Scripps Co. Also joining the network will be Cox Communications, which publishes the Atlanta Journal Constitution and Denver Post publisher MediaNews Group Inc.
QuadrantONE, which debuted in February, is designed for newspaper publishers to capture money that advertisers are taking away from printed newspapers and moving online as they see more people spending their time on the Internet.
The privately held company was founded and is owned by Gannett Co Inc, San Francisco Chronicle publisher Hearst Corp, The New York Times Co and Tribune Co, publisher of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.
Larger publishers employ sales staff who sell ad space across multiple papers, Web sites and local television stations, but smaller papers do not always have those resources. Sometimes advertisers prefer to avoid those papers instead of calling hundreds at a time to buy space.
The papers joining quadrantONE are members of a group formed with Yahoo Inc that is devoted, in part, to raising ad revenue at newspaper Web sites and helping Yahoo to tap local US ad markets more effectively.
An Associated Press (AP) report had some other details:
QuadrantOne will create a centralized pool of standardised ad units from newspapers across the country that can be sold in blocks to large advertisers. The goal is to simplify the process for large brand advertisers such as apparel companies to buy national online advertising on a large scale, without having to deal separately with many local media outlets.
QuadrantOne is owned by its four founding newspaper companies, but is actively seeking other newspapers to become affiliates to create a large pool of online advertising inventory.
A separate newspaper industry venture called the Newspaper National Network sells print and online ads across a network of papers, but that entity sells group ads on an ad hoc basis and doesn't have a central pool of ad units ready to be sold, as QuadrantOne does.
Rusty Coats, the chief online executive at Media General, said the company was contributing advertising spots from its large-market properties, such as The Tampa Tribune's website, TBO.com. Coats said the ad sales being done through QuadrantOne wouldn't overlap with the company's cooperation efforts with Yahoo.
