US: WaPost unveils blog ad network

Posted by Jean Yves Chainon on February 26, 2007 at 10:43 AM

Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive (WPNI) officially unveiled its blog ad network, Blogroll. Blogroll is designed to appeal to niche marketers and Lufthansa is its first sponsor, appearing on travel-centric blogs.

WPNI used the services of Adify to implement Blogroll.

"WashingtonPost.com has been around for years and it has established teams for advertising. But when they're going to serve advertising across a network of 1,500 blogs, there's a whole new set of challenges," said Adify CEO and co-founder Larry Braitman.

WPNI’s work is to publicize the blog ad network, while Adify does much of the ad serving, account management and customer support.

WPNI outsourced the job to stay focused on its core competence of news content delivery.

"This type of endeavor -- combining our ad space with that of third-party publishers into new ad units -- is a media industry first and we sought a partner that could remove the complexity of quickly getting it off the ground," said Jeff Burkett, director of business development for WPNI.

Source: Clickz.com