Last year, Zillow cut a deal with a newspaper consortium to run Zillow ads on its real estate sites. Now the deal is expanding, with members of the consortium and Zillow selling ads on each others sites — a local real estate advertising network. Zillow is reaching more than 5 million unique monthly visitors – giving the newspaper partners an expanded base to sell on. Eleven companies are in the newspaper group, including Scripps, Hearst and MediaNews.
ClickZ: Forging relationships with newspapers will help Zillow appeal to advertisers for whom its 5.4 million-strong audience is too paltry, according to Greg Schwartz, VP of sales at Zillow. “We need Yahoo Local scale,” said Schwartz, adding advertisers “want to see 50 million reach.”
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Consortium….. hmmmm… how is that whole thing going.
Is it going to burst open one day into one big belly-ache like AP has recently??
I swear I never hear any real newspaper technology boost like was so touted by Yahoo when this was launched… In fact, aside from ‘brokered deals’ I never hear anything…
And I wonder when there is something announced why my newspaper online friends (yes I still have friends) don’t tell me how great it is themselves…
All of these announcements remind me of boring ill-fated RealCities announcements — just insert that instead of ‘consortium’
Am I missing something?
nope, you pretty much covered it.
it basically bought a lot of mid to high level execs another couple of years.
I can’t tell you the number of people i talked to who said:
“we had to do something…”
50 million is basically Local, yup.
Thanks wtf.
The publisher of the Charleston Post and Courier (who is actually a great guy) said the same thing several times when arguing FOR joining the consortium.
In our company, the digital division’s argument against it was — and should still be — that this is an overt attempt by Yahoo to weasel themselves into the local markets. If the papers were to join at all it should be in a very limited way — not diving headfirst into the entire deal.
Recent statements by Hilary Schnider — herself very familiar with newspaper’s plights — make this extremely clear. Yet, “the consortium” was supposed to be the panecea for local papers.
I suspect that 5 years from now, we will be able to track back and determine it was what helped speed up their decline…
Brett Shaw from Cyberhomes:
I can appreciate the fact that Zillow is trying to make money and that newspapers are trying to recapture some of their losses. The problem with this is that it is just buying time for the newspapers and zillow is in a way pushing agents away.
Let me explain. With any local area there are going to be a certain number of advertising spots available. There has to be in order for an ad to be posted the pre-determined number of times. So in essence, by opening up these spots for local advertisers from the newspapers (non real estate related), they are limiting the number of ads available to real estate agents.
Why is this a problem? Agents thrive on marketing and exposure. If you limit this, then agents aren’t going to spend the money for advertising on Zillow’s site. On top of that (if I read correctly), they are wanting to raise the price for the ads? The two in conjunction will not sit well with professionals, who then won’t use the site or send others there.