Three of the UK’s four large regional newspaper groups are to pool their digital advertising space, giving brands access to more than 50 million online readers as they attempt to fight back against the drain of ad spend to tech companies such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook.
Johnston Press, Newsquest, Local World and a number of smaller publishers are to launch digital trading platform 1XL, allowing advertisers a one-stop digital shop covering more than 800 local newspaper websites.
“This will create a larger UK online audience than any national newspaper website and compete with the likes of MSN, AOL and Yahoo,” said Henry Faure Walker, chief executive of Newsquest. “We are confident we can eat into the revenues currently enjoyed by a Google or Facebook by offering one booking point.”
The only one of the four largest regional newspaper group not to join the 1XL platform is Trinity Mirror, which attracts more than 24 million monthly unique users to its regional newspaper websites. Trinity Mirror is focusing on a “One Trinity” strategy to bring its own national and regional newspaper brands together.
The UK online display ad market is worth more than £2bn annually, and is growing quickly, but local newspapers have struggled to compete with the scale of rivals.
1XL will deliver advertisers almost 50 million UK monthly unique users from Johnston Press, Newsquest and Local World websites and apps, according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations figures for the first half of the year.
Blanche Sainsbury, commercial director at Local World, said that means local newspapers will finally be able to compete for the UK’s biggest advertisers that traditionally focus spend on the websites of the national newspaper brands.
The largest national newspaper website, Mail Online, attracted a monthly UK web audience of 57.8 million in September, according to recent ABC figures. The Guardian, the second most popular UK paper online, attracted 35.8 million monthly unique users.
Scott Gill, group commercial director at Mediaforce, which will run the 1XL platform, said the ad platform is the “silver bullet” advertisers have been waiting for to justify investing more digital ad spend into local papers.
Revenue will be split between the partners based upon the share of digital ad inventory that each contributes to the network.
Local World, which runs websites for papers including the Bristol Post and South Wales Evening Post, averaged 16.4 million monthly unique users in the first half of 2014.
Newsquest, which runs sites for papers including The Northern Echo and Glasgow’s Evening Times, averaged just over 16 million monthly unique users in the first half.
Johnston Press, which owns titles including the Scotsman and Yorkshire Post, had about 15.5 million monthly unique users on its website portfolio at the end of June.
It is not known how many more users the smaller publishing partners will contribute, but the total network will deliver more than 50,000 articles a week.
Ashley Highfield, chief executive of Johnston Press and a former senior executive at Microsoft, said local newspaper web content is of better quality than a lot of internet content where advertisers currently commit their spend.
“Having run one of those other US portals, in the UK the difference is this is top-quality content, delivered by trusted journalists,” he said. “The network is of the same scale of the big American portals, is of top quality and micro-addressable.”
• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email media@theguardian.com or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly “for publication”.
• To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook.
