Bartz gives backing to Yahoo-Newspaper Ad project

As I noted last night over on my home blog Carol Bartz is starting the process of stamping Yahoo into her mould of what she wants for the company and the in the trenches staff of the company seem to be enjoying the change. Part of this change as well is a revamping of a 2006 partnership with a select group of newspapers. The advertising partnership was originally setup to deal with classified ads but most recently that has been centered around a new ad system that allows them to sell graphical ads on their sites that are aimed as specific audiences – such as car buyers or sports enthusiasts.

This new system 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 today about this new move by Yahoo how the ad system is suppose to work

This allows publishers to sell, say, high-priced travel ads not only on 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 doesn’t 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 other new element of the partnership allows newspapers to sell ads on Yahoo pages, with the two sides sharing the resulting revenue. That lets newspapers promise advertisers that their messages will reach a larger portion of the local audience, helping the newspapers compete more effectively with television.

So far the 100 newspapers involved in the program have been reporting some solid results, even during this downturn 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?”

One of the big concerns to the people involved 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 looks like at least one project from the past will survive into the future and settling the nerves of more than a few newspaper executives in the process.

[picture courtesy of Globe Mail]