Philly.com joins Yahoo! online consortium

Philly.com, a division of Philadelphia Media Holdings that also hosts online content from The Inquirer and the Daily News, has joined a consortium of media companies partnering with Yahoo! to increase online advertising and job recruitment.

The partnership relies on "behavioral targeting" to help boost revenue at a time when newspaper advertising is suffering as a result of the bad economy and a drop in retail sales.

Print advertising at newspapers was down 17.7 percent last year compared to 2007, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

"The combination of our audience and Yahoo's audience allows us to reach 80 percent of the online users in the Philadelphia region," said Philly.com president Eric Grilly. "That eclipses anyone else's reach in the market."

Yahoo! is equipped with an ad-serving technology and a vast subscriber base that will allow Philly.com to better target users through their online behavioral patterns, Grilly said. With the technology, advertisers can tailor their ads to certain audiences.

"Behavioral targeting" is described in the Philly.com marketing material as "placing the right ad in front of the right person at the right time."

More than 35 companies representing more than 800 newspapers nationally have joined the Yahoo! newspaper consortium, including the Knoxville News Sentinel in Tennessee and the Naples Daily News and its sister E.W. Scripps Co. publications in Southwest Florida.

Member papers have had different launch dates over the last six months. Grilly said Philly.com, which signed on a year ago, launched with an ad blitz three weeks ago. "We talked it over with 200 advertisers and received overwhelming positive response and a number of initial commitments."

This is a long-term strategic partnership, said Dan Sarko, vice president of advertising for Philly.com, which gets about 60 million unique monthly page views and reaches 5 million-plus visitors monthly.

"This will allow us to be more competitive in an aggressive online environment," he said. "This is cutting-edge technology, and an industry bet."