On Monday Duncan Riley reported on TechCrunch that 17 more newspapers have joined in on Yahoo!'s partnership with local news sites; these papers include 16 regional papers owned by The New Times Company but not the NYT itself.
A main part of this partnership is that local newspapers can buy job listings from Yahoo!'s HotJobs site. In return the local sites upload job listings to Yahoo!'s HotJobs, and they can charge a higher price for these listings.
The idea behind this partnership seems logical. Yahoo! gets access to more job listings that are provided by its partners while the local newspapers can offer those who purchase job listings a greater forum in which their positions are advertised on.
So far, this logic has worked out for Cox Newspapers, which owns the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. According to the Associated Press on Monday Cox has enjoyed increased revenues. For instance, Cox owned Austin American-Statesman enjoys a "market share for online recruitment ads is now 40 percent, up 19 percentage points from a year ago."
The fact that more papers have signed in on this partnership is an indication that it is working. However, Yahoo! is not alone in offering such services. For instance, Gannett and Tribune — the top two newspaper publishers (as measured by circulation) — haven't joined Yahoo! yet. Perhaps they are too interested in their own jobs site, CareerBuilder, that they run with McClatchy — a fellow newspaper publisher. Further, there are other jobs sites out there like Monster. That leaves plenty of options for papers like The Washington Post, which hasn't joined in the Yahoo! partnership, to consider; that's what the paper told the AP that it's doing.
Thus, as newspapers and advertisers alike realize that on-line ad space is growing in importance, more publishers are considering banding together to deal with advertisers. Looking forward, if partnerships like Yahoo!'s are profitable, a key question is: Who else wants to get in the game of selling and culling on-line ad space on local news sites?
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