Politico Joins Quadrant One
QuadrantOne -- the online ad sales network launched last year by Gannett Co., Hearst Corp., The New York Times Co., and Tribune Co. -- has added Politico as its first national affiliate. QuadrantOne is owned by its four founding companies, but has actively sought affiliate partners to create a larger pool of online ad inventory for national advertisers.
QuadrantOne reaches well over 20 major markets and over a dozen smaller ones, with a network of newspaper and broadcast sites.
Politico.com is expected to add 6.3 million unique monthly visitors to quadrantONE's existing base of some 47 million.
"Politico augments our story to marketers, showing that we do have a legitimate national offering," said QuadrantOne CEO Andy Ellenthal. "And, on their own, it might not necessarily be in Politico's wheelhouse to get more consumer focused advertisers that we work with."
To simplify the buying process for large brand advertisers, QuadrantOne recently created a centralized pool of standardized ad units from newspapers nationwide, which can then be sold off in blocks.
QuadrantOne recently reached a similar partnership with The Associated Press. Ellenthal predicted the company will announce two or three more such deals before the end of the year.
The partnership comes amid solid growth in usership of online news resources. According to Nielsen Online, in January the number of monthly unique visitors to newspaper Web sites increased 7.9 million to 74.8 million, a jump of 11.9% over the same month in 2008.
Per the same measurements, 44% of all Web users visited newspaper Web sites in January, an increase of 7.3% over January 2008. The number of page views generated increased 15.4% to 3.7 billion.
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quadrantONE, the fledgling online-advertising-focused joint venture between Hearst Corporation, The New York Times Company, Gannett Co. Inc., and the Tribune Co., has signed on Politico as its latest affiliate partner.
Going forward, the year-old company will begin packaging Politico.com’s six million-plus unique users with its 340 or so local news sites to national advertisers, selling display and video ads on the site. With the addition of Politico’s audience, quadrantONE’s network now reaches 45 million unique monthly users in total, according to CEO Andy Ellenthal—more than double the reach of a year ago when the company first entered the market.
quadrantONE was originally founded in February of last year as a means to create clout for local newspaper and information sites that typically don’t have the resources or relationships to target national ad dollars.
The concept was to package premium ad placements for national brands across multiple sites at once, rather than selling remnant ad inventory as many networks do. “The reason why we exist is to create efficiency in reaching out to national advertisers,” said Ellenthal. “Buyers don’t want to deal with hundreds of sites, and most local sites don’t have the scales or resources to target them.”
According to Ellenthal, for Politico—which also manages its own ad network—the affiliation with quadrantONE is aimed at helping the site expand beyond its core political-junkie-targeting ad base. “Politico has strength in certain categories like advocacy groups, which we don’t touch,” he said. “This is about bring advertisers that might not have considered Politico on its own. Like national autos for example. We’re already there. For these consumer advertisers that like news, Politico now becomes a natural fit.”
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The national online ad sales alliance
quadrantONE, long an ad network for newspapers, is slowly branching out. Recently, it signed up D.C.-focused news site
Politico as its latest member. The deal just covers not just the Politico site itself, but its entire 60-member ad network, which includes
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
The Denver Post, and the
Cleveland Plain Dealer as well as Reuters. While Politico technically operates a small newspaper—it’s free with a circ of about 25,000 in the Capitol Hill area and comes out three days a week when Congress is in session—the addition of the site to its client roster is seen as a way of quadrantONE broadening its reach beyond traditional dailies.
I talked with Andy Ellenthal, the former DoubleClick exec who became quadrantONE’s CEO nearly a year ago, about the move beyond newspaper websites, why some people still confuse quadrantONE with the Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Newspaper Consortium, and how the latter half of this year is looking for the ad-sales alliance. The Q&A begins after the jump
paidContent: Yahoo’s alliance is more about driving a two-way flow of local and national online content and ad sales. quadrantONE has always tried to position itself as strictly national in terms of ad sales. Does the introduction of Politico and its newspaper sites heighten or soften that position?
Ellenthal: The reason we exist is to pull the content together in a way that’s appealing for national advertisers. We’re competing on the national level against Yahoo News and CNN. That’s where Politico adds an extra layer of content and greater attractiveness for users and national advertisers. We do kind of get bucketed into this local ad sales playing field—and we will do spot buys if an insurance company, for example, wants the 25 top markets. But we want to be competitive across the entire national platform. Everything else is extra.
PC: The company opened its doors in February 2008 and you came on in July. Even though you don’t have much to compare it to, how have been affected by the pullback in ad spending?
AE: If I had a five-year track record, things might look differently. The reality is, we’ve had this platform turned on for a year and our salesforce has been around in a full capacity only since Q3. So every month is actually an improvement. Even the auto advertisers, which includes General Motors and Ford, continue to be one of our largest categories, along with retail, travel, insurance and casual dining. Packaged goods in an area that we expect to grow, despite the lingering recession. We want to be in a position where we have a good blend of advertisers and where we’re not overly dependent on one or even a small handful of categories.
In August and September, financial services was looking like that was going to be a particularly important area for us. But with the collapse of the financial markets last year, that quickly turned south. If we had been betting solely on that, that could have been a problem. But we never went that route. Still, we do want to be ready for when the financial sector comes back.
PC: The companies that helped create quadrantONE—Tribune Company, Gannett (NYSE: GCI), Hearst Newspapers and NYTCo (NYSE: NYT)— have spent the past year making deep spending cuts. Have the challenges affecting those companies begun to impact quadrantONE?
AE: I can’t talk about the company’s financials, but being small—we employ fewer than 30 staffers—certainly helps. As far as our backers are concerned, right now, it’s about demonstrating traction in the marketplace and bringing new advertisers to our affiliates. We are self-sufficient in so many ways and we’re not dependent on someone else’s services to operate our business. That said, we have no plans to hire additional staff until at least 2010. We had been doing a fair bit of hiring up to this point. But it’s not just the economy; I never liked to hire after June anyway. It’s hard to take in employees as you get into Q3 and Q4, as things get busier and it’s harder to make sure people get absorbed into the company in the best way. And we’re pretty set right now as it is.
