During today’s conference call, A.H. Belo Corporation (AHC) which closed at a precarious $1.81 per share today and better known as owners of major regional and local newspapers such as the Dallas Morning News, reported that they have integrated their newspaper sites fully onto Yahoo!’s APT platform and are realizing revenue. Unfortunately, it’s not enough revenue to preclude a RIF.
The transcript on Seeking Alpha offers the following:
“AHC’s participation in the Yahoo! Newspaper consortium continues to expand as we implement Yahoo’s behavioral targeting capabilities. In 2008 AHC generated $1.2 million in incremental revenue related to the Beta testing of Yahoo’s behavioral targeting capabilities with approximately 80% of that revenue generated by The Dallas Morning News, and the remainder by The Providence Journal and The Press-Enterprise.
A.H. Belo is the first member of the newspaper consortium to have all of its properties on the Yahoo APT platform. Given the current advertising trends are unlikely to improve in the near-term we continue to align AHC’s expense structure to revenue trends. I outlined several such initiatives in a letter to employees last month. The most significant is a further reduction in force across the company.”
Beyond the ongoing challenges of the newspaper business, the behavioral revenues are hard to understand without a sense of how many users and exact time period, but $1 million doesn’t sound bad for behavioral targeting on 3 news sites (80% of the $1.2 mil.). We’d assume these revenues include the revenue for the display ad placement in addition to the cookie.
