Tomio Geron's article titled Yahoo, Newspapers Tout Alliance posted on redherring states: Yahoo's content and advertising alliance with newspapers has grown almost threefold in the program's first six months, the Internet portal said this week. The rapid growth suggests that Yahoo's newspaper partnership strategy could prove far more successful than more limited efforts by rival Google to sell print ads.

Yahoo in November unveiled an alliance with 7 newspaper groups, representing some 150 titles across the U.S., under which Yahoo's HotJobs service and the papers swap online job classified ads. That alliance has since grown to include 17 publishing groups encompassing more than 400 daily papers, Hilary Schneider, executive vice president of Yahoo marketplaces, said at a Deutsche Bank Media and Telecommunications conference this week.

The alliance allows Yahoo to tap newspapers' highly local audiences and advertisers while giving newspapers access to Yahoo's wide national audience and advertisers. Hearst, a key member of the alliance, said the alliance has already generated millions of dollars in additional revenue for its newspapers in the first half of this year. "Most of this revenue has extremely high profitability," said Lincoln Millstein, Hearst senior vice president and director of digital media. "That's just the initial phase. There's a lot of revenue opportunities we're talking about."

Yahoo is also integrating newspaper news content across its properties, such as the Yahoo homepage, MyYahoo, Mail, Local, Autos, and other sites, Ms. Schneider said. Search monetization on the newspapers' sites will roll out in the latter half of 2007, and display ads will roll in 2008. Yahoo brings as much as a whopping eight-fold increase in audience reach for the newspapers, which provides more places to sell ads, Ms. Schneider said.