A.H. Belo makes $1.2 Million from 2008 behavioral targeting tests

You may recall that when we announced our APT advertising platform last year, we said that the first customers to use it were members of our Newspaper Consortium. Well, the Newspaper Consortium is now seeing early successes.  For example, A. H. Belo, the first holding company to have all of its papers on APT, said in its recent earnings call that its partnership with Yahoo! has been one of its financial bright spots.

CEO Robert Decherd didn’t give revenue projections for APT, but said A. H. Belo had made $1.2 million last year beta testing Yahoo!’s behavioral targeting and saw auto ad revenues rise for the Dallas Morning News. In his words:

 ”You’re going to have three newspapers using this tool on our sites, but I don’t want to leave you with the impression that the $1.2 million is the most we expect to realize out of this deal. That was mostly one paper and was a test. We’ve now got APT at all our papers and we’ve got the ability, thanks to Yahoo, to sell behaviorally targeted ads on our own sites. This will make a significant difference for us this year.”

For more information about APT, visit apt.yahoo.com.

— The Team

…and other tales from the blogosphere

Ever feel like you’ve missed an opportunity? If you’re a blogger, you don’t want to miss out on capitalizing on a popular blog post, as Jennifer Slegg points out in her excellent post, Springboard off of a successful blog entry. Her advice boils down to a couple of main points:

• They liked your post? Write more like it. (It’s so simple, when you think about it.)
• Find a reason to link to the people who linked to your post, both as a way to repay their generosity and to establish a relationship that can get you added to their blogroll.

For advice on making social media marketing work for you, we looked at Lee Odden’s interview of Dave Evans, author of Social Media Marketing an Hour a Day. Despite the seemingly freewheeling nature of social media, Evans says that it’s important to measure social media campaigns—and, because it’s digital, that it’s not that hard to do.

We’re all about the books this week. Dave Bollier, editor of onthecommons.org, has written Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own, which details the rise of open-source software and Creative Commons licenses. “Viral spiral” is the term Bollier uses to describe “the almost-magical process by which Internet users can come together to build online commons and tools.” We like that Bollier practices what he preaches. You can buy a hard copy of his work, or you can download it for free.

Our colleagues at Flickr are embarking on their own social experiment, and they’d like you to take part. To celebrate the launch last year of Flickr video—and the Flickrverse in general—they’re about to launch the Flickr Clock, which will display video taken every hour of the day. “As more members participate, we’ll have the opportunity to experience what a moment in time looks like from a diversity of perspectives,” they say. You can upload your own video to the Flickr Clock Group, and tag it with the time that it was shot.

Finally, have you wondered if the celebrities posting questions in Yahoo! Answers were real, and not, say, Halibut21 under a different guise? The Answers blog says you can tell by their “official” badge under their icon, which they can only get if they’re the real deal. I don’t have my official badge yet, so you’re just going to have to take my word that I’m real. 

  — Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor