Yahoo!, which is the primary reason a host of newspapers formed an entity known as the Newspaper Consortium a few years back, is making some moves that analysts rightly indicate should cause the newspapers some indigestion.
They've struck a deal with AT&T to use the phone company's local sales force to sell ads on Yahoo's ad platform known as APT. That platform was built with the papers and designed so papers could sell behaviorally-targeted ads to local customers on their sites and on Yahoo as well. What happens when AT&T releases its thousands of sales people start to make local sales calls too?
Ken Doctor, at Outsell Insights has some excellent perspective (you have to register but it's worth it):
Outsell believes the week's developments should simply serve as a strong reminder to newspaper companies about nature of partnering in the digital world. Today's partner may be tomorrow's competitor, and vice versa. That means corporate development and business development need to be strengthened, ongoing high-level efforts to find, manage, measure, optimize, and sometimes replace the many web alliances that are key to success.
You haven't heard about it in the journalism trade press. You didn't see images on the design blogs. They haven't debated it on the business 2.0 sites. Maybe it's because we didn't invest in whizbang technology, dismantle our newsroom or hire Rob Curley. But the Dallas Morning News has launched a serious effort to cover news in 15 neighborhoods and towns in our region, using seasoned reporters, community home pages, aggregation tools, staff blogs and citizen input.
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From Lost Remote:
Yahoo has taken the wraps off APT (formerly AMP), its new display ad platform that has been under development with the newspaper consortium. In a nutshell, sites on the platform will be able to leverage behavioral data across Yahoo and the network to improve ad targeting. Agencies and advertisers, in theory, will spend on the platform because of its scale, simplicity and deep reporting. APT has been in testing with SFGate.com and MercuryNews.com, and now it will expand to A.H. Belo (us), Cox Newspapers, the MediaNews Group and Scripps Newspapers before fully launching next year. More info on Yahoo’s APT site right here.
Everyone's buzzing about Yahoo Buzz, including Tech Crunch, the Bible of Silicon Valley, in this post: Yahoo Buzz: Yahoo Reveals Stats From The First Two Weeks. In short:
"...it’s clear that a link from Yahoo.com blows away anything Digg or any other competitor can offer. That will keep the Buzz publishers, who must be invited into the service, paying attention."
We certainly are. Yahoo linked to us 5 times in the past couple of weeks and absolutely blew away our traffic. As more and more publishers vie for this kind of link, we can expect that we'll be chosen less and less frequently.
From Jennifer Okamoto, who led the charge on this:
Starting today on dallasnews.com, readers can vote for the most interesting stories of the moment as part of a partnership with Yahoo.
The Dallas Morning News is contributing to Buzz, Yahoo’s newly launched social news site. It pulls feeds from 100 sources, including newspapers, blogs and magazines and ranks their stories based on readers’ votes, searches and forwarded e-mails.
Look for the Yahoo ! Buzz button on each story on the site to vote for an article and see how it ranks among other stories online today. Stories with the highest Buzz score may be displayed on the Yahoo.com home page.
Buzz is similar to another popular recommendation tool, Digg. Users can “Digg” a story on dallasnews.com by clicking the “Bookmark” link.
Robert Niles provides a brief guide on How, and where, to hyperlink within a news story -- which has relevance in two areas for us at TDMN (The Dallas Morning News, for those who don't work here.) First, bloggers should ask themselves if they're lnking to something that makes sense. Secondly, as we look at vetting computer-based inline linking software, we should remember we can't just set up the system and forget it. Robert noted one example of how that didn't serve Yahoo very well:
[Yahoo] linked the first reference to the country "China" in a story about the upcoming Beijing Olympics to... a page listing China's medal count from the most recent Olympics, in 2006. In Turin, Italy.