In another example of traditional media buying digital companies, Gannett, Knight-Ridder, and Tribune Co. yesterday announced their acquisition of a 75 percent ownership stake in local news aggregator Topix.net. The companies declined to discuss the cost or specific terms, other than to state that each will own a 25 percent stake in Topix.net. The deal closed last week. Since its official launch a year ago, Topix.net has continuously monitored over 10,000 news, media, and government sites around the Web, organizing links to articles in more than 300,000 subject areas. A Knight-Ridder spokeswoman described the move as a means to broaden the publisher's distribution channels. "The real value for Knight-Ridder is in the technology," she said, adding that it would assist the company to "better distribute both news content and advertising." From Dow Jones & Company's acquisition of MarketWatch in November to The New York Times Company's purchase of About.com, announced last month, traditional news publishers are continuing to encroach on the interactive space and its trove of ad dollars. Topix.net is ad-funded, with a proprietary classification on top of Google's AdSense program, which allows for ad targeting. Topix.net already tracks sites operated by Gannett, Knight-Ridder, and Tribune, but the new relationship will bring the company closer to the publishers' online advertisers, allowing it to expand its services and technology thanks to the added content and funds provided by its new investors. "We'll be able to reach more readers--those publishers have 30 million unique visitors a month, altogether--and they will benefit from our highly localized, contextual advertising technology," Mike Markson, vice president of business development at Topix.net, said. Markson estimated that Topix.net's click-through rates have tripled since it launched last year, in large part because of its technology that allows Topix.net to be just as relevant locally as nationally. David Curle, an Outsell Inc. analyst, depicted the collective acquisition as an attempt by the publishers to regain control over their content. "Publishers don't mind the traffic that aggregators bring to their own sites, but they resent the loss of control over their readers, and the way in which they experience publishers' content and advertising," said Curle. Topix.net, with its remaining 25 percent share, will continue to run the site from its home offices in Palo Alto, Calif.
Aging Shea Stadium will get some high-tech glitz with a series of 20 high-definition, 50-inch video screens to serve game information and advertisements. The screens, to be installed by Arena Media Networks, will be in place in time for the New York Mets' season opener against the Houston Astros on April 11. Arena Media, based in Port St. Lucie, Fla., has already installed screens in seven other stadiums around the country, including the MCI Center in Washington and the Fleet Center in Boston. The company deals primarily in National Basketball Association, National Hockey League, and Women's National Basketball Association properties, but has also installed monitors in Pro Player Stadium in Miami, which hosts the National Football League's Dolphins and the Major League Baseball's Marlins. Shea Stadium marks Arena's second baseball stadium deal. "Shea's one of the older ballparks in the U.S., and that's part of the idea," said Arena's co-CEO and co-founder, Tom Kiernan. "Our displays are going to enhance the fan experience." Stadiums usually use the screens to show ads--generally stills, cuts from television ads, and logos--as well as content, like scores from other games, statistics, and team trivia. Kiernan also said that it was possible to brand the content with sponsor's logos. Kiernan said that two of Shea's building sponsors have already signed up to run ads on the screens. In Arena's other deals, ads tend to be from the stadiums' corporate sponsors. The sale of the ads is primarily done through the New York Mets' in-house sales team, Kiernan said, but Arena and the Mets are sharing the responsibility of selling the space. He declined to comment on the rates for a spot.
Amid intense competition with search engine Google, Yahoo! yesterday said it will soon enlarge the size of its users' mail storage spaces from 250 megabytes to one gigabyte. The change, expected by late April, will allow users to store four times more e-mail on their Yahoo! Mail accounts. Analysts believe the improvement is Yahoo!'s response to Google's move last spring to offer one gigabyte of free storage to users of its Gmail service. "What Google's Gmail has done is to kill any hope MSN or Yahoo! may have had of getting users to pay for mail storage," Kelsey Group analyst Greg Sterling said. The cost of storage also has fallen significantly over the past year, according to Sanjeev Aggarwal, an analyst at Yankee Group. "Thanks to the arrival of serial ATA disks, the cost of one gigabyte of storage has dropped from $5 to 50 cents from a year ago," explained Aggarwal. "The lowering of this price point gives companies the opportunity to use storage as a lure for other value added services." Users checking their Yahoo! Mail accounts make up about 40 percent of all Yahoo! page views, according to some estimates, and page views equal ad revenue. At 20.7 percent, e-mail accounted for a greater percentage of ad impressions sold on a cost-per-thousand basis than any other genre in February, according to Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance data. (Portals and search engines rated second at 16.6 percent, followed by general/national news at 10.7 percent.) The storage upgrade will begin in late April, and will take about two weeks to complete, a Yahoo! spokeswoman confirmed. Yahoo! is also beefing up antivirus protection for e-mail users, giving them the ability to remove viruses from attachments--a feature that had only been available to paying customers until this point, the spokeswoman confirmed. Microsoft's MSN Hotmail limits free storage on its accounts to 250 megabytes. Yahoo! and MSN both offer two gigabytes of storage to users who pay some $20 a year for the premium service.
More consumers with Web access are logging onto the Internet to research cars than staining their fingers with newspaper ink, according to a newly released Keynote report. The study, based on an analysis of 2,000 respondents who were considering buying a car, found that 76 percent of consumers visit a manufacturer's Web site and 65 percent of consumers visit a non- manufacturer Web site. But only 53 percent of consumers with online connections turn to newspapers. The report also found that Kelley Blue Book rates highest with consumers for satisfaction, brand recognition, and likelihood of conversion, out of a total of 10 non-manufacturer car Web sites: Autobytel.com, Automotive.com, AutoTrader.com, Cars.com, CarsDirect, Edmunds.com, Kelley Blue Book, MSN Autos, Vehix.com, and Yahoo! Autos. Cars.com was the second-highest-rated site overall, and Edmunds.com came in third. To assess conversion likelihood, Keynote asked the consumer testers how likely they were to return to the site for additional research, or to make a purchase, said Jones. Consumer satisfaction hinged on whether testers found the site easy to use and well-organized. Kelley Blue Book's site drew 4.7 million unique visitors in February, compared to 1.9 at both Cars.com and Edmunds.com, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. eBay Motors--the most heavily trafficked non-manufacturer car site, with more than 10 million unique visitors in February, according to Nielsen//NetRatings--was not included in the survey. For the study, conducted during the last week of December, Keynote divided its 2,000-member panel into 10 groups of 200, so that each consumer was assigned to test just one site.