Zillow.com Makes Deal With 11 Newspaper Chains To Carry Real Estate Ads
By Staci D. Kramer - Mon 12 Nov 2007 10:16 PM PST
Real estate site Zillow.com, which specializes in house price comparisons, will carry real estate listings from 11 newspaper publishers including Hearst Newspapers, Lee Enterprises, (NYSE: LEE) MediaNews Group, EW Scripps (NYSE: SSP) and MediaGeneral. Together, the companies account for 282 newspapers, among them the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Local advertisers placing real estate ads at the papers will be offered the chance to put their listing and open house info on Zillow.com. The papers will have access to Zillow content to use on their own sites. Rollout is slated to begin in the first half of 2008. No financial terms disclosed.
In his blog post about the deal, Zillow’s president Lloyd Frink said the site and the papers are talking about other content-sharing as well. Zillow claims four million monthly unique visitors and that 70 percent of them are buying or selling now, or planning to within next 12-24 months. Release.
It’s the latest in a series of moves by newspapers to work with popular online classified destinations. Several of the chains are part of the Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Newspaper Consortium, which began as a way to cross-sell job listings with Yahoo HotJobs. (The Zillow press release even references the Yahoo consortium, saying “this new initiative extends the alliance of these newspaper companies to the real estate sector.") The NYT and others are working with Monster.com. Most recently, several chains, including Hearst and MediaNews, floated the idea of forming their own national ad network for display ads rather than rely on partnerships with companies like Yahoo that also compete with them.
Other publishers involved in the Zillow deal include Journal Register (NYSE: JRC) Company; Morris Communications Company; Paddock Publications; Pittsburgh Tribune-Review; Times-Shamrock Communications and The Day Publishing Company.
Posted in: Advertising, Companies, Hearst, MediaNews, Scripps, Yahoo, Media, Newspapers
Tags: zillow,
