A post earlier this week on the Yahoo Publisher Network blog got me thinking about newspapers.

Almost daily, large traditional print publishers are moving resources to their online operations. ..

Yahoo! is helping newspapers make this transition through our APT product serving the Newspaper Consortium…

The idea that Yahoo! is targetting newspaper companies as a revenue stream is what interests me here.  With articles around the web crying the death of the printed news, the time is perfect to be targetting these companies and it’s silly it took news of Yahoo! doing it to spur me on.

Large national paper sites like thestar.com are some of the most frequently visited sites on the net, and have extremely low Alexa rankings.  Combine this with a nice geotargeted selling strategy and it sounds like a win to me, and that is exactly how Yahoo! is playing it.

On a smaller level, you’ve got the countless smaller local papers who haven’t been bought up by a large corporation yet.  While the number of these operations dwindles, they still represent a significant chunk of paper readership.  Has Yahoo! targetted these guys yet?

The Point

I guess my point here is it doesn’t hurt to copy off the big guys once in awhile.  Yahoo! going after newspaper people?  Why don’t we try that too, and leverage these big news Yahoo deals to try and spur on the sale?  Can’t hurt!

The news also leads me to believe there will be a lot more targetted newspaper inventory up for grabs in the near future.  Always an easy sell to advertisers.

Newspapers are definitely a vertical to be watching in the coming months!