The Local Media Consortium, a cooperative of more than 40 local news publishers and broadcasters, including Cox Media Group, McClatchy and Hearst Corporation, has partnered with Google to launch a private ad exchange where advertisers can buy finely targeted local inventory. The group claims it will be able to collectively offer 10 billion hyperlocal, targeted impressions per month across 800 daily newspapers and 200 broadcast channels.
“The exciting part about this new exchange is that it allows all of the consortium’s members to bring together their inventory in a private exchange — this is unique in the industry,” Laurent Cordier, managing director, Americas partnerships, news and magazines for Google, told Nieman Journalism Labs. “The vision is that this will be not just about remnant inventory, but a way for the consortium members to monetize their full businesses.”
Local news organizations, facing heavy competition with national players online, have had to drastically cut rates to stay competitive. By improving efficiencies with Google’s programmatic trading platform, the Local Media Consortium (LMC) hopes to increase publishers’ cut of CPMs. Negotiating power is also an issue: before the exchange, local publishers were selling remnant inventory to large networks at a steep discount.
“The goal here is cohesion to all of that inventory, so we’re not being pecked to death by ducks and we’re not seeing our rate destroyed,” LMC executive director Rusty Coats told Nieman. “The idea is to make buying us so efficient that we get more of those dollars and there’s less nipped off the edges.”
An earlier effort by the LMC (under the name The Newspaper Consortium) to sell member impressions in bulk to Yahoo’s ad network languished in 2010 after the abrupt departure of Hilary Schneider, who managed the program at Yahoo. The LMC says the deal was stymied by a lack of technological solutions that made placement and billing unwieldy. It expects Google’s exchange technology will significantly improve what Coats called “the plumbing” of digital media sales.
Together, LMC sites have 200 million unique visitors and 1.7 billion page views per month, more than The New York Times or the Huffington Post. The group has said it will no longer be pursuing exclusive partnerships, and is currently renegotiating its deal with Yahoo in addition to its partnership with Google.
