Attack of the Local Ad Networks

iMedia reports on a new local ad network being launched by publishing industry software/platform vendor MediaSpan and Broadcast Interactive Media. The new network combines local TV, radio and newspaper websites. According to the iMedia piece:

The combined network represents more than 1,200 local television, radio and newspaper websites that reach approximately 13 million unique visitors.

To put this in perspective, SuperPages claims 17 million monthly uniques and Google Maps has about 25 million monthly searches (I know apples to oranges). Thus, it offers meaningful but not comprehensive local reach.

This comes a few days after Gannett, Tribune and McClatchy’s new “Open Network” was exposed by the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile there’s local buying service Centro (not a network per se) and the Yahoo!-led newspaper consortium with more than 180 newspapers.

Established ad networks like AOL’s Advertising.com and DoubleClick offer geotargeting. And WorldNow offers a local ad network with almost 13 million uniques and 170 local TV station websites.

Then there are the “exchanges,” AdECN and RightMedia (Yahoo! is a significant investor), which offer geotargeting. And that doesn’t count geotargeted search spending, which I calculated on Google represents about 8% of projected 2006 US paid search revenues.

That’s a lot of folks trying to get a piece of the $100 billion local ad spend (Universal McCann).

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Here’s more from MediaPost (reg req’d) on the new MediaSpan local network.

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