When ClickZ News asked newly-hired Philly.com president Eric Grilly in March whether the site's parent company Philadelphia Media Holdings would be the next to join the Yahoo newspaper consortium, he answered, "Stay tuned." Well, now it's official, and not especially surprising to close observers of the growing paper partnership, which now includes 19 paper publishers of almost 400 newspapers, according to Yahoo
When ClickZ News asked newly-hired Philly.com president Eric Grilly in March whether the site’s parent company Philadelphia Media Holdings would be the next to join the Yahoo newspaper consortium, he answered, “Stay tuned.”
Well, now it’s official, and not especially surprising to close observers of the growing paper partnership, which now includes 19 paper publishers of almost 400 newspapers, according to Yahoo. While most other publisher partners have started out pushing Yahoo’s HotJobs recruitment classifieds across the newspaper sites, and including their own job ads in the HotJobs database, Philly.com will not be integrating HotJobs listings.
Indeed, Philly’s already tied to Monster. The two firms launched a co-branded job search and recruitment site last summer. Until then, Philly.com’s job classifieds were powered by Monster rival CareerBuilder.
A Yahoo spokesperson told me the Yahoo/Philly.com deal was just signed, and Philly has agreed to use Yahoo’s “core services.” That means the publisher will integrate Yahoo’s display ad platform on its site and sell inventory through Yahoo’s national advertising sales force. It will also enable Yahoo paid search on Philly.com, and push its own local content out on Yahoo.
Other recent additions are New York’s GateHouse Media, Paxton Media Group covering the South and Midwest, The Tribune Review Publishing Company, publisher of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and Connecticut’s The Day Publishing Company.
Former president and CEO of MediaNews Group Interactive, Grilly played an instrumental role in developing the ad distribution deal between Yahoo and an initial set of newspaper publishers. When we spoke in March, Grilly said he planned on helping finalize contractual negotiations for the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium before departing MediaNews Group.
Because the paper group was a pet project of Grilly’s I’ll bet Philly.com will be among the early adopters of future Yahoo integration.
Please note this post was updated to reflect the fact that Philly.com will not integrate Yahoo’s HotJobs listings on its site.
