By Dan Lindley
Less than a year after signing an initial agreement to partner with The Newspaper Consortium, Zillow, the online real estate site, has closed a deal with the alliance of 282 American newspapers to form a real estate advertising network in which each side can sell display ads on the other’s sites.
Under Zillow’s advertising network agreement, sales teams for Zillow and for the Consortium’s member newspapers will offer each other’s premium advertising inventory to their respective client bases. Local newspaper advertisers will be able to reach Zillow’s national audience of more than 5 million unique monthly visitors. Zillow’s advertisers get access to local audiences visiting real estate sections of the newspapers’ Web sites and to additional national advertising inventory across the Zillow Newspaper Consortium. In sum, the alliance adds up to more than 63 million monthly unique visitors, according to Zillow.
The new deal represents a “two-fold value proposition” and is “leaps and bounds above the kind of relationships we’ve had with newspapers before,” said Greg Schwartz, Zillow’s VP of advertising sales. It offers Consortium members “an equitable share of the revenue” and “unmatched reach.” Brokers and advertisers get access to a “highly metricized” form of online advertising that can be as broad as the nation or as narrow as a zip code or even a house, he added.
Despite the dismal state of housing sales and prices in the U.S., Schwartz said, the deal offers a chance for Zillow and the newspapers to “grow mindshare in a down market” and “get on the ground floor.” Zillow’s 100 engineers will offer newspapers a high-quality back-end platform, Schwartz said. “We believe we have the best technology and we will be adjusting that technology for newspapers for the rest of the year,” he told CIR.
Zillow has a sales force of 20 full-time reps based in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and its home base of Seattle. Will problems arise as Zillow’s national sales team works with newspapers’ local sales forces?
“Joint sales are never easy,” Schwartz conceded. But he said he’s “bullish” on the collaboration. Zillow will invest in intensive training to make the transition easier, he said. Zillow managers will be crisscrossing the country “doing regular 12-hour sessions” with 75 to 85 newspaper managers.
“This partnership allows advertisers with our papers to reach not only local real estate consumers who live in particular markets, but also consumers who may be moving to particular markets, via their searches on Zillow.com,” said Lincoln Millstein, SVP of Hearst Newspapers. “This is a significant opportunity for advertisers to target a very large number of consumers on the verge of major home-related commerce.”
The new Zillow advertising network extends a partnership with 11 major newspaper publishing companies announced in November 2007 that lets local real estate classified advertisers also purchase featured listings and open house advertisements on Zillow. The newspaper companies participating in the ad network include Hearst Newspapers; Lee Enterprises, Inc.; Media General, Inc.; MediaNews Group, Inc.; Morris Communications Company, Philadelphia Media Holdings; and The E.W. Scripps Company. Newspapers include major metro dailies such as The San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, The Tampa Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
