Trib, Yahoo! HotJobs Sharing Advertising Efforts
By Mike Copeland, Waco Tribune-Herald, Texas
Feb. 11–Companies that buy help-wanted ads at the Tribune-Herald can choose to have those same ads placed on Yahoo! HotJobs, one of the most popular job-search Web sites.
That’s because the Trib’s parent, Cox Newspapers Inc., is among eight major newspaper groups nationwide working with Yahoo! to expand the scope of newspaper advertising.
Trib publisher Michael Vivio said since the new service recently went public, more than 75 percent of those buying recruitment ads are choosing to take advantage of all three options: placing the ad in the newspaper, on the wacotrib.com Web site and on Yahoo! HotJobs.
Vivio said it costs a little more to appear in all three places, but advertisers appear to want the additional exposure.
“Yahoo! HotJobs has a little more than 71,000 registered users in the Waco area, and that’s in addition to the large number of people who come to our Web site looking for jobs,” said advertising director Carla D’ Andrea.
Publishers participating in the consortium include Belo Corp, which owns the Dallas Morning News, Cox Newspapers Inc., E.W. Scripps Co., Hearst Newspapers, the Journal Register Co., Lee Enterprises Inc., MediaNews Group and Media General. It includes more than 200 publications.
Newspapers once considered Yahoo! and other online job-search sites as Internet rivals. But perceptions are changing.
“We used to think of them as competitors, and in some ways they are still competitors,” Lincoln Millstein, senior vice president of Hearst Newspapers, told trade paper Inside Classified. “Just because we compete in one area does not mean that we can’t do business in other areas.”
D’ Andrea said she believes Yahoo! is a better choice for the consortium than other job-hunt sites such as Monster.com or careerbuilders.com.
“Those are specifically job-search sites, whereas Yahoo! provides information on just a huge number of different categories,” she said. “It’s really a destination site that people go to for other things. So it will be natural for them to want to go to Yahoo! HotJobs.”
Advertisers are getting greater reach for their dollar, she added.
“If I run a doctor’s office and I’m looking for a new head nurse, I might run an ad in wacotrib.com, and it would only appear in wacotrib.com,” she said, adding that a presence on Yahoo!HotJobs creates national exposure.
For Yahoo!, the benefits are many.
It will gain access “to the most trusted source of local content,” the daily newspaper, as well as an expanded network of sales professionals at the local level, said Dan Finnigan, senior vice president of Yahoo! HotJobs.
The Trib has been cultivating relationships with local advertisers and business people for 114 years, said Vivio, while Yahoo! has national contacts and infrastructure that can well serve the newspapers.
“Yahoo! has the largest market share of national advertising of anyone online, and we are negotiating to have them represent us,” Millstein said.
That means national ads could be appearing on the newspapers’ Web sites.
Later this year, Vivio said, the Trib and Yahoo! HotJobs will become even closer. The help-wanted section in the paper’s classified section will carry the Yahoo! name, and the help-wanted site on wacotrib.com will merge with Yahoo! HotJobs to become one.
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Copyright (c) 2007, Waco Tribune-Herald, Texas
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