Sunnyvale, California — Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s iron lady is gaining momentum with her newly selected battalion the process of sculpturing Yahoo into her mould of what she wants for the company and in the midst of shake-up the staff of the company seem to be enjoying the change. Apart from revamping the management, Yahoo has also initiated some change as well in its 2006 partnership with a select group of newspapers.
Terry Widener, a 53-year-old newspaper seller at The Knoxville News Sentinel in Knoxville, Tenn., had never had a chanced to sell an Internet ad.
But, with the Yahoo-Newspaper ad venture that was originally launched to deal with classified ads but most recently that has been focused around a new ad system that enables them to sell graphical ads on their sites that are aimed as specific audiences — such as car buyers or sports enthusiasts.
“I’m pretty much from the old school,” Ms. Widener said. “It was such a learning experience. Hopefully I am going to sell more and more online.”
Many newspaper owners and publishers have similar hopes, as the new mechanism puts users into these different groups based on the pages they view while they are on the site. Miguel Helft from the New York Times explains in an article about this new move by Yahoo how the ad system is suppose to work.
Through the partnership, ad salespeople at newspapers sell local businesses on advertising packages that allow them reach visitors to the newspapers’ Web sites and Yahoo users in the area. The newspapers also employ Yahoo technology that enables them charge more for ads on their sites.
This process enables publishers to sell, say, high-priced travel ads not just on the travel pages but also on any page visited by a user interested in travel. An advertiser may have paid 50 cents to reach every thousand visitors to a high school sports page, for example, said Leon Levitt, vice president for digital at Cox Newspapers. “Now it does not matter where the page is on the site,” Mr. Levitt said. “All of a sudden we can sell that page for $15” for every 1,000 visitors who are interested in travel, he said.
The concept suggest that the partnership with Yahoo is one of the only promising spots in an otherwise horrible advertising market.
Yahoo, which has been torn down with internal turmoil and slumping growth, is also hailing its alliance with the newspaper consortium as one of its most important efforts. The consortium has grown to nearly 800 dailies, up from 176 in 2006.
“It seems to be hitting the sweet spot for both newspapers and Yahoo,” said Lem Lloyd, a Yahoo vice president for the partnership.
So far the 100 newspapers involved in the program have been reporting some solid results, even during this declining economic climate which had one of the newspaper exec’s, George H. Cogswell III publisher of the Ventura County Star, say “If we could do just shy of $1 million in two weeks in a horrible economy, what does it mean for us when the economy turns?”
Yahoo’s bet on the newspaper consortium will not give a meaningful lift to its finances this year or tilt the balance in its fight with Google, which dominates the online ad business.
“In 2009, this partnership is unimportant,” said Hilary Schneider, executive vice president for North America at Yahoo, who is one of the driving forces behind the alliance. “If you look at the long-term opportunity, it is material, and it continues to exceed our expectations.”
One of the major concerns to the people associated with the program was the arrival of Carol Bartz but have been assured that in the words of Ms Schneider, Bartz’s new chief executive, that “Carol looks at this partnership as core to Yahoo’s future.”
So it seems that at least one project from the past will make headway into the future and settling the nerves of more than a few newspaper executives in the process.