• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, August 3, 2006

In a deal that expands its youthful audience, MTV has acquired campus marketer Y2M: Youth Media & Marketing Networks to meld with its 24-hour college network, mtvU.

Through the deal, Y2M's network of 2,000 print and 450 online student newspapers is expected to give mtvU's advertisers a new avenue to reach 18- to-24-year-olds, while the online newspapers will be able to soup up their sites with help from the media powerhouse.

"There is no more relevant media brand on campus than the local student newspaper," said Stephen Friedman, general manager of mtvU. For mtvU's 150 national advertisers--ranging from Motorola to Taco Bell--the newspaper network represents another way "to get inside the college bubble," according to Friedman.

Accounting for the overlap between Y2M's online audience of 5 million college students and mtvU's 7 million, he estimates the combined audience would increase to 9 million.

Acquiring the student newspaper network also fits with mtvU's efforts to provide an increasing amount of user-created content to help it forge a more seamless connection with the college audience.

To that end, MTV also hopes to assist student newspapers in turning their sites into campus media hubs--complete with rich media, community and e-commerce features, and music dowloading. "They want to be up to speed with national news sites," said Friedman. Despite MTV's powerful corporate ties, students would continue to have complete editorial control over their online publications, he adds.

Colleges with newspapers included in Y2M's publishing network include the University of Southern California, Ohio State University, and Harvard University.

On the business side, mtvU would seek to expand the revenue-sharing arrangement in which student papers and Y2M split ad revenues on the newspapers' sites while the newspapers received all of the ad dollars from print versions. That would involve increasing the newspaper sites' share of ad revenue based on their traffic. Friedman said mtvU.com would likely provide some type of gateway to the network of online college newspapers, but the sites themselves could decide whether to link from mtvU. In addition to the cable TV network and Web sites, mtvU runs more than 300 on-campus events annually, including concerts and the taping of its shows.

Terms of the MTV/Y2M deal were not disclosed.