Yahoo! Sends 100M Visits to Newspapers, How Much Money Is That?

Yahoo! just announced that they’ve sent over 100M visits to the Newspaper Consortium from Yahoo! sites. The Consortium is a partnership of holding companies that contains 770 local newspapers. And apparently they are pretty happy about getting links to their articles throughout Yahoo!

“It’s very exciting when our news makes it to Yahoo.com’s top features,” said Anthony Moor, Deputy Managing Editor, Interactive, The Dallas Morning News, and editor of dallasnews.com. “It’s like a firehose blasting us with up to 800,000 page views in just a couple of hours. We’ve had placements that have accounted for up to 27 percent of the day’s page views, and 65 percent of the day’s unique visitors.”

When I read this article the first question that came to my mind was how much ad revenue Yahoo! created for the Consortium through that traffic, so it’s time for some back of the envelope math!

(Note, I have no inside information or statistics and these are all just estimated guesses).

1. Yahoo! has sent 100 million visits to Consortium websites.

2. Let’s assume an average page views per visit at a conservative 3 pages viewed per visit which gives us an estimated 300 million page views created.

3. Some brief viewing of newspaper sites gives me an average of around 5 ad impressions per page. That gives us a total of 1.5 billion ad impressions created.

4. A portion of those impressions are going to be sold at high CPM rates, while a portion will be sold at lower non-guaranteed rates below $1. How much depends on the individual newspapers and the strength of their salesforces. This is a tough one to estimate, but let’s just say the average nets out to a $2 CPM overall.

Divide 1.5 billion by 1000 to get 1.5 million. Then multiply by $2 to get a total of $3 million dollars that Yahoo! has provided in direct ad revenue.

Conclusion
Obviously if you change any of those numbers they’re so large the results change dramatically, but I feel like this is at least a decent estimate of direct revenue. That of course doesn’t tell the whole story as many users may become return visitors, bookmark sites, visit sponsored sections, or provide revenue to the newspaper in other ways.

“More than the bursts and spikes, sharing our content with Yahoo! brings a steady growth in traffic to our site, which provides us with more inventory to sell to our advertisers,” said Jon Beck, Vice President, Online Advertising and Business Development, The New York Daily News. “Our overall partnership with Yahoo! has been game-changing, and has brought new energy to our content and business.”

That’s exciting stuff to hear for Yahoo!. I think it’s also one advantage they have over Google and others in advertising relationship is the ability to create partnerships that go beyond just direct monetization to provide value to publishers in many ways. It’s going to be interesting to watch as Yahoo! gets more aggressive in opening up their own sites to traffic partnerships and advertising deals.