Rival Online Publishers Team Up For Ads
from the tough-environment dept
The only ad environment is not very healthy right now. Everyone knows that. So, what do you do if much of your business depends on online ads? It seems the best thing right now might be to band together with your competitors and hope to wait out the storm. Five big names in online publishing (News.com, NYTimes.com, CBS Marketwatch, USAToday.com, and Weather.com) have teamed up to sell ads for the "at work" market in one shot. Of course, I had thought this was what companies like DoubleClick had originally been set up to do, but I guess things have changed. The big difference concerning this relationship seems to be that they'll be targeting ads by "daypart" - so they'll only be running ads at certain times (when people are at work). It will be interesting to see how well this works, and how quickly it gets abandoned. While it may take some of the ad sales pressure off of people at each company, how happy are the companies going to be when they only get one-fifth of the money they convinced an advertiser to part with?
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1/5 of a small number
If this plan convinces companies to spend some money they otherwise would not have spent, its a win.
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Is this collusion?
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