Listings and valuation portal Zillow.com and a consortium of 11 newspaper publishers have forged an alliance allowing them to offer advertisers access to each other’s audiences.
The Zillow Advertising Network allows newspaper advertisers to reach Zillow’s national audience of more than 5 million unique visitors per month, the companies said, while Zillow advertisers get access to local audiences through real estate sections of newspaper Web sites.
A furniture store in San Francisco could target the 750,000 Zillow visitors who research San Francisco Bay Area homes each month on Zillow.com, for example, while simultaneously reaching the online audience of the San Francisco Chronicle. Advertisers can drill down even further with their ads on Zillow, targeting visits to specific ZIP codes, neighborhoods or individual homes.
The network is an extension of a consortium Zillow formed in November with 282 newspapers to allow local real estate classified advertisers to also purchase featured listings and open house advertisements on Zillow (see story).
The newspaper chains partnering with Zillow include Hearst Newspapers, Lee Enterprises Inc., Media General Inc., MediaNews Group Inc., Morris Communications Co. LLC, Philadelphia Media Holdings and The E.W. Scripps Co. Major dailies published by the companies include the San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, The Tampa Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
"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, senior vice president of Hearst Newspapers, in a press release. "This is a significant opportunity for advertisers to target a very large number of consumers on the verge of major home-related commerce."
Rival listings portal Trulia announced its own ad network in May, and plans to begin running advertisements soon, a spokeswoman for the company said.
The Trulia Ad Network is designed to provide a single point of contact for billing and reporting to allow real estate brokers and lenders to target multiple real estate niche sites, including Oodle, Homes & Land and The Savvy Source (see story).
Trulia has seen "great interest from publishers and potential advertisers" and is the process of signing additional publishers, said Katie Wickham, Trulia industry marketing specialist.
"Our team is having many conversations with media companies to find the right advertisers, and we will be making a more formal announcement about the growth most likely in early 2009," Wickham said in an e-mail. "We will begin running some initial advertisers on the network soon, and will continue to add new publishers and advertisers as we go."
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