Newspaper Giants form Online Ad Network

A few of the 'big boys' on the web but especially in print media--Tribune, Gannett, Hearst, and the New York Times--are forming an online sales network to attract premium advertisers for their content.  Tech crunch covers the news here.

The network is called quandrantONE and is intended to compete with major context advertising from Yahoo and Google.  This specialization will hopefully attract higher quality and better targeted ads to serve these companies' networks.

This really doesn't mean a whole lot for affiliate marketers as they won't be able to use the network, but it does show a growing number of niche and specialized ad networks.  With more and more of these networks emerging there are better opportunities for advertisers to better target their markets.  But, there also comes an increasing disconnect between ad networks.

If you think of highly "target-able", premium ad space as a commodity, and take into account the growing number of "markets" that you can buy these commodities from, then it may not be too crazy to think of a "market of markets" emerging.  This market of markets could be thought of as a commodities exchange, much like what we think of the Chicago Board of Trade or the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Perhaps not too far from now we will see these ad spaces (markets) be unified by a single market--the Internet Advertising exchange.