Gannett announced Friday that it would begin selling targeted display ads to run on Yahoo! and sites for its 81 newspapers and seven of its broadcast stations nationwide.
The deal adds Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper publisher, to an advertising consortium that includes more than 800 members, according to Online Media Daily. McClatchy newspapers, the third-largest publisher, was one of the first members of the consortium, formed in November 2006.
Like other publishers in the deal, Gannett may also provide local content for Yahoo! properties in the U.S., including the Yahoo! homepage.
“To date, the consortium has sold more than 40,000 ad campaigns onto Yahoo! totaling more than $100 million in sales to date, according to Lem Lloyd, vice president of channel sales at Yahoo!,” says Online Media Daily.
Yahoo’s publishing platform enables “local newspapers to target consumers according to geographic, demographic and behavioral factors in ads that appear on Yahoo! properties from mail to sports to news.”
Yahoo!, which at the time was being run by former Knight Ridder executives, said at the launch of the program that it was teaming with newspapers because they already had local advertising staffs.
Local advertising accounts for about half of the $245 billion in total U.S. ad spending, Online Media Daily says.
Gannett announced in May that it would begin to sell online marketing services, another program adopted earlier by McClatchy. GannettLocal offers search engine marketing, e-mail, digital display, website and geo-targeted print/flyers.