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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  • identicon
    alternatives, 18 Jun 2002 @ 1:18am

    1/5 of a small number

    is better than 1/5 of zero.

    If this plan convinces companies to spend some money they otherwise would not have spent, its a win.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    david, 18 Jun 2002 @ 12:38pm

    Is this collusion?

    At what point in time, does it become collusion? 5 or more large publishers join their ad inventory to sell out open space... what if their alignment results in higher ad rates overall? These are desireable ad spaces in the business world, and we have to doubt that joining forces is for the opportunity to offer lower CPM rates. And they have put the reality of the gig in the open field by announcing it. Guess we will see what happens in the long run.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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