USA Today Tech Blog 2.. Megan Warren

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USA Today: Article: Media Companies Battle Google or Ad Dollars
By: Anick Jesdanun
March 24, 2008

Forbes Inc is going to announce Monday that it will start selling ads this spring for about 400 financial blogs. Conde Nast, Viacom Inc, CBS Corp and more major companies have talked about topic-specific ad networks to get advertisers that want to buy more ads than most single sites can offer or sell. If newspapers, magazines and broadcasters can't expand online ad space, then they are "under threat of becoming less and less relevant to the advertiser," said Russ Fradin, chief executive of Adify Corp. They supply and run ad networks for big networks like Forbes.

Some of those media networks might have a hard time competing with the large networks such as Google, Yahoo, Time Warner and AOL. $11 Billion has be spent by these companies to buy smaller ad networks, so they can expand. Microsoft alone spend over $40 billion for Yahoo.

Advertisers would perfer not to handle with thousands of individual websites, they want more networks like Google. The portal ad networks have accomplished selling their affiliates' leftover ads at smaller prices and then splitting their revenue.

Many traditional media companies are used to selling their ads on their own offline channels, therefor they are resisting overtures to join these large networks. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. thinks it is better off recruiting one to two dozen leading lifestyles sites that meet the standards and selling high priced ads to places like Macy's, Ace Hard ware. Rather than joining large networks

USA Today and Tribune the nations 2 largest newspaper publishes have formed networks amongst themselves. These two newspapers have joined Hearst Corp and the New York times has formed QuadrantOne that collectively sells some online ads. 26 other newspaper companies have also joined. Smalled networks can't produce on the large scale advertisers are looking for says the operators of the larger networks.

Forbes is wanting to increase business by 10 - 15% with hundreds of blogger. Even if a media company can bring together 10-20 blogs the traffic overall won't be growing that much compared to what a large Internet company offers.

Media companies are have a hard time finding their networks hard to ignore, even if they were to join the larger efforts. MSNBC partners with NBC and Microsoft use Microsoft's ad technology and sales teams by recently created networks around politics.

"We can't match what Microsoft does, ... but they represent a lot of different products," said Kyoo Kim, vice president of sales with MSNBC.com. "We want to make sure we protect our brand and be in charge of our own destiny as well."