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Newspaper Ad Network Shuns Google, Yahoo, MS 71

Posted by Zonk from the anything-you-can-do-we-can-do-better dept.
Ian Lamont writes "The New York Times, and the Tribune, Gannett, and Hearst companies have launched their own ad network, called QuadrantOne. It will let advertisers place ads on media sites in 27 major markets, and let them target readers by content type, demographic information, and online behavior. Notably absent from the deal: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Both Google and Yahoo have their own ad networks focused on newspapers, but, as the article says, 'if newspapers develop better ways to sell their own online ads, they may not have to share revenue with their Web counterparts such as Yahoo and Google.'"
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Newspaper Ad Network Shuns Google, Yahoo, MS More

Newspaper Ad Network Shuns Google, Yahoo, MS

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  • Good, and not so good (Score:4, Insightful)

    by zappepcs ( 820751 ) on Friday February 15, 2008 @01:56PM (#22437522) Journal
    One one hand, the last thing that my life needs is more sources of advertising to clutter life up.

    On the other hand is a glove... wait..
    No, on the other hand is the fact that this creates competition in the online advertising arena. I had not thought that to be a problem before, but so it goes. Let them at it. It will either help keep print media afloat a bit longer or send them down the toilet that much faster.

    Personally, I'm all for having a bit more competition in the op-ed and fact-checking areas of mainstream media... MAYBE... and I'm only saying MAYBE one of the MSM outlets will attempt to keep themselves alive and relevant by becoming a TRUSTWORTHY source of news...

    I'm sure I'll wake up soon and wonder what this dream was all about, so go back to your regularly scheduled programming. Have you ever wondered why they didn't just say program? or show? or entertainment?

    Freudian slip perhaps?

    • Re:Good, and not so good (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Intron ( 870560 ) on Friday February 15, 2008 @02:09PM (#22437696)
      Google makes its money selling ads without having to actually create its own content, so I'm not surprised that the content creators are striking back. I don't see where this creates any competition in the "op-ed and fact-checking" areas -- all of the bloggers and slashdot-type forum sites have ad-sense. Are you saying that there is a news source that is more trustworthy than the MSM? Who?

    • Re:Good, and not so good (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sm62704 ( 957197 ) on Friday February 15, 2008 @02:34PM (#22438014) Journal
      Online newspaper advertising as it's now done is the absolute WORST. You can barely read that damned paper without all the flashing and blinking and popovers and such garbege. As I read the paper on break at work and my employer uses IE it's especially odius.

      When the Chicago Tribune got bought the first thing they did was to make the advertising worse, made the whole damned thing in Flash, with no way to right click, and every time you went back to the front page you got an intro ad.

      It annoyed me so much I found the "contact" page and detailed exactly how mind bogglingly stupid they were, why, and how it cost them at least one reader, and how I was never going to buy ANYTHING any of their advertisers hawked in such an offensive manner. And didn't go back for quite a while.

      Apparently their online circulation dropped dramatically after their attack of incredible stupidity, because it's back like it was.

      How can you trust news from people stupid enough to annoy their audience?

      -mcgrew

      (and now for more annoyance, the mcgrew journal The Robyn 'Hood. An old girlfriend, a true lady (not the girlfriend unfortunately), and a couple of whores. Brought to you by Microsoft. Microsoft: takes a licking and keeps on [no carrier] [slashdot.org]

      • How can you trust news from people stupid enough to annoy their audience?
        Because they're reporters and editors, not marketers?

        I guess they also recognise the trade-off between annoying your customers and making money via advertising, and even though you personally happened to feel annoyed, perhaps they were making more money of the impressions they did get.
    • I hate ads I really hate them a lot! And now I got a site with Google ads, just hoping I can work on a site more than my craptacular jobs that I have had as of late.
  • But all I can think about is how they seem to cry monopoly when some kind of new competition shows up.
    I hate to say it, but I expect them to call for some kind of investigators in on this one too if they haven't already...

  • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Huh? (Score:2, Funny)

    by symbolset ( 646467 )

    What's a newspaper?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Cctoide ( 923843 )
      It's what you get when you print out an article from NYTim--... hey, wait, this dictionary doesn't seem to agree. Where's the edit link?
    • It's an archaic long-forgotten form of the Internet. It was popular in the days of steam when the World was in black and white. It's essentially a flat webpage that's too large to fit down a tube, so had to be delivered by hand via an army of small boys (kind of like giant nanobots -- though some exhibited tendencies like viruses).

      Like the Internet, much of the Newspaper network was ruled by the Prince of Darkness, Rupert Murdoch.
    • something you wrap dead fish in
    • It's many sheets of paper made from dead trees with distilled lies printed on it using soybean ink. It's really useful as fuel and as a liner for small animal cages.

  • They need to quit writing crap (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Friday February 15, 2008 @02:03PM (#22437610) Journal
    Apparently, the news industry is hurting. But the problem is that anymore they are all the same. More and more, they all spout the same thing, and will not cover what is news worthy (bad reporting, spin, whatever). These days, I have been turning overseas to find out exactly what America is up to, and then MIGHT see the article buried about a month later. That is NOT how we are suppose to get the story. This AM got into a discussion with another about reporting and at some point it was mentioned that if not spin, then it was shoddy reporting. For the last 5 years, I have seen nothing but increasingly shoddy reporting.

    • Apparently, the news industry is hurting. But the problem is that anymore they are all the same. More and more, they all spout the same thing, and will not cover what is news worthy (bad reporting, spin, whatever).

      The problem is this isn't really true unless you're talking about small "hometown" newspapers like the Tacoma Tribune... The NYT, San Fran Chron, and other "national" papers do a fairly good job of actual news reporting, and anyway all that "news" you get from "overseas" sources is from the AP or

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by WindBourne ( 631190 )
        What you're looking for is anti-Republican, anti-Bush political editorial type stuff, and it's out there. No, I am not looking for that. I am looking for news stories about what is going on. For example, will the house vote on the telco bill WITH the immunity in there (the immunity started LONG before 9/11, and parts of this may go back to clinton). I noticed that little was in the press concerning all the dem senators that supported that immunity. Likewise, how much news do we see on Sibel Edmunds (she wil

        • No, I am not looking for that. I am looking for news stories about what is going on. For example, will the house vote on the telco bill WITH the immunity in there (the immunity started LONG before 9/11, and parts of this may go back to clinton).

          That sounds an awful lot like your interested in reporting with an editorial slant. It's out there... I did a simple Google News search and found exactly all you ask for, and in American news sources.

          I noticed that little was in the press concerning all the dem sen

  • Good development (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Friday February 15, 2008 @02:07PM (#22437664) Homepage

    That makes sense.

    A big problem with Google's "content network" is that most of the ad sites have no real content. The newspaper industry at least has something worth attaching ads to. Google is taking a 50% cut of ad revenue without doing very much for it.

    This may push Google ads towards the "bottom feeder" made-for-Adwords sites, especially if the news media become very aggressive about going after anyone copying their content. This will make thosse ads much less valuable; that's where the low-value clicks come from.

    • Google is KNOWN for their search engine and for how targeted their ads are between the end viewer AND the site. In the denver post or rocky mountain news, when I see ads beside some article, they have NOTHING to do with the content. ABsolutely nothing. I noticed that when I was reading about the butchery at NIU, that I was being shown ads about dating women on the east coast. I am not single, and I have nothing to do with the east coast, and what does dating have to do with an idiot running around murdering

  •   as if MS needs another reason to try buying a competitor, along comes a new ad platform. the markets may not be a popular as some of the portal aggregators, but there's more than enough market to go around.

      does anyone have an ad platform broker, that manages your ads on multiple platforms for you? i mean, thats the spirit of the web - encapsulate and aggregate, right?
    • Clickshare Service Corp. (http://www.clickshare.com/aboutus) received last month a patent on a technology which facilitates federated authentication, the sharing of information about advertising and content views, and settlement of transactions among multiple websites. A key feature is that each participating website keeps control of its own user base and users can offer selected demographic information about themselves -- automagically -- when the arrive at a site. This allows for customization, and also

  • well then... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sfing_ter ( 99478 ) on Friday February 15, 2008 @02:12PM (#22437736) Homepage Journal
    Open Adblock control - insert domain... and there you have it, another empty space where annoyance used to be :D

    • I don't block Google ads because Google has avoided obnoxious ads. I won't block Q1 ads unless they decide to make them obnoxious (e.g. flash, animations, large, pop ups, etc). Given the history of the newspaper business not keeping up with the world, I worry that I may end up having to block them. Then I'd become some kind of news freeloader.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by penix1 ( 722987 )
        I block not only for the annoyance factor but to actually speed up my browsing. Why should I have to wait for some foreign ad server to give me a cheesy ad I won't click anyway? I consider it my way of clearing those stopped up interweb tubes...
  • The old monopolies are dying out.

    This is true freedom and they don't like it.
  • And I say let them die. The Internet has really replaced the newspaper.
    First the newspaper was the only real source for news.
    Then Radio Came along and TV. And the news Paper still did pritty good. Because the News on them would only cover particular topics and usually gloss over details... and they still do.

    Now with the internet it changed the rules for good.
    You can get more news on the Internet then with news papers. The news is always up to date, and you can drill down to the real details if you wanted

    • Re:Newspapers are dieing. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PriceIke ( 751512 ) on Friday February 15, 2008 @02:28PM (#22437938)

      Newspapers, as a medium for delivering news, are dying. However the newsrooms that create content for the papers are crucial to the journalism industry, because they don't exist in any other media. TV news is fast, get some visuals, talk to a few folks and get it all done by 6:00pm. Newspaper journalists can pour more investigation and actual news reporting into a 2 column story than some anchorbabe can read on a teleprompter in 30-40 seconds.

      The newspaper has to be kept alive, and if they figure out how to successfully produce enough revenue to continue to publish on the Web, great. But when you think about how much the work newspapers do influences all the other media, you start to wonder what how the profession as a whole would suffer if newspapers died out altogether.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Morris Thorpe ( 762715 )
      I assume you mean that the *paper* delivery method is dying. As news gathering organizations, "newspapers" will survive (at least those that adapt.)

      I canceled my subscription to my local newspaper around 1998, when they began putting their content online. I still use them as a source for news, however.

      I'll be the first to say that the present state of the news media is sad. Still, there will always be a place for professional news gathering organizations.
  • Hopefully this will launch a long drawn out feature war. Remember we are talking about Google and Microsoft here. They have their hands and are flush with so much cash that they can just outflank newspapers in so many ways by simply blocking entry or buying it out.

    This is probably a good thing for the publishers and advertisers.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday February 15, 2008 @02:24PM (#22437878)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by thedlw ( 1007823 )
      Regular newspapers are mostly a thing of the past. I can see in my lifetime newspapers going under perm to things like wired/news.com etc...

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm a reporter at a small-town newspaper, and I say this: if small-town newspapers go down, then you're going to have trouble. Show me the blogger that's going to attend every single town and school board meeting without getting paid, and report on it. In rare cases, you might get a neighborhood nut who's willing to do it for nothing, but by and large most of the time you're not going to get anything. And then you have a large segment of your money going to a part of the government where back-room deals
      • I'm right there with you. There's still a place for small-town papers because all those decisions being made by your local politicians affect your daily life more than what you'll read in the New York Times. And who's going to cover those exciting meetings? Maybe that can get outsourced to India [freerepublic.com], too.

        I grow tired of all the people who are quick to toss out accusations about the media as "lapdogs," "writing crap," "shoddy reporting," "one-sided," etc. Fair enough, but I find those accusations usually get thr

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by kdart ( 574 )
        I agree that good reporting from a professional is worthwhile. But the rules have changed (a little). Newspapers have almost always been funded by their advertisers. Web sites can also be funded by advertisers. All you need is something to draw "eyeballs"... Well, the web is great leveler. You can make your own online newspaper without much startup cost. So, if you produce good reporting that people want to read, put up your own "webzine", but some (tasteful) ads on it, and you're in business. On the other

    • There is a case that, for me, was the last straw. It was written in the Pilot, which is a major Virginia media outlet. I have a write up here showing how much of a f$%^ing lapdog the media was in not questioning how the police carried out this raid.
      Say what you will about the mainstream media, but they don't have guys shilling their websites on Internet fora.

  • Privacy Concerns? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by fourohfour ( 1056594 )
    From the http://www.quadrantone.com/ [quadrantone.com] site:
    "Access to sophisticated audience targeting by context, behavior and demographics".
    I can see how they can target by context (selling to specific websites), but how can they target by behavior or demographics? Will they be looking at the cookies on user machines to try to determine behavior? How will they get demographic information?
  • They are finally figuring out this thing and that they are the ones publishing the current and continuously updated content. Why do you need a middle man like Google, Yahoo, or MSN to get in the way? These guys have been selling advertising longer then founders of those three companies have been alive.
    • By coincidence, I have launched my own network of local roads for access to the rest of the world.
      Notably absent from the deal: The highway and freeway systems.

      I'm sure I'll have lots of visitors.

  • Netcraft confirms it! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The New York Times is dying.

    Even the New York Times [nytimes.com] confirms it.


  • I'm not surprised that the average person doesn't remember the rise and fall of New Century Network [businessweek.com], but at the very least some of the newspapers involved in this debacle-to-be should -- they're about to make all the same mistakes over again!

  • Demographics? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by LMacG ( 118321 ) on Friday February 15, 2008 @02:54PM (#22438330) Journal
    "target readers by content type, demographic information, and online behavior."

    Yeah, OK. When I created logins for the NYT and the Washington Post websites, I'm pretty sure I told them I was born in 1901, live in ZIP code 90210, and am female.

    Good luck with that advertising, guys.

  • The newspaper industry's antidote? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JeffHunt ( 129508 ) on Friday February 15, 2008 @03:36PM (#22438974) Homepage
    I read some of the comments and it seems like people are saying that this is a desperate attempt to save the newspaper industry. I don't think it's desperate at all - I think it's actually a wise choice. The players are engaging in what's called a "vertical market" - in case anyone overlooked this fact - in order to serve the needs of the core business.

    They're not trying to save the ship: they're building a better ship.

    • this logo font formatting is reminiscent of all the .COM bust companies of the past:

      quadrantONE

      Whenever I see a logo like that, I rarely read past it.
    • That's a good point, but they did this only in response to Google's attempt to sell the newspaper ad inventory. Google found an untapped market they could exploit with their software, and the newspapers didn't like it. Notice though that the newspapers never thought of it until Google tried to get in.

      Newspapers have been notoriously slow to change. They crept into online only when they had to. They hardly noticed that Ebay and Craigslist had utterly destroyed their classified ads (at least in this town
      • Notice though that the newspapers never thought of it until Google tried to get in.

        I'd say that this isn't completely accurate. They didn't make a move until after Google's plans became public. Whether these print media companies actually had this plan on the drawing board before Google's announcement is something we can't, won't, and don't know.

        Just putting that out there...
  • ...there we go. I suppose "quadrantONE.com" will do. Strangely enough, when you go to the site, it doesn't give you a tracking cookie. (Yet.)
  • Anyone got the FQDNs and nameservers for the domains these bozos want to use yet? I've got null zones for most of the major ad servers, i.e., 247realmedia.com, doubleclick.com, atdmt.com, amongst many others, already set up on my nameserver. This change is going to cost another 20 minutes of my time to craft null zones for their domains so I don't have to see their idiotic crap.

  • Fine! (Score:1)

    by jjrff ( 891275 )
    Screw you guys .. I'm .. going home.
  • and as soon as they start the adservices, I'll block [fanboy.co.nz] them :)
  • The three (two) potential purchasers of this service are shockingly absent? Shocking. You'd think if you wanted to make money selling something to someone you'd ask them if they wanted to be in on the ground floor. Yes, they want to sell it to Microsoft or Google.

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