Media companies battle Google for ad dollars

NEW YORK -- Traditional media companies trying to stem the flow of advertising dollars to Google and other large Internet companies are increasingly building ad networks of their own, anchored by their brands.

The latest, Forbes Inc., is expected to announce Monday that it will start selling ads this spring for about 400 financial blogs. In recent months, Conde Nast, Viacom Inc., CBS Corp. and other major media companies also have unveiled topic-specific ad networks to lure advertisers that want to buy more ads than any single site can sell.

If newspapers, magazines and broadcasters cannot expand online ad inventory, they are "under threat of becoming less and less relevant to the advertiser," said Russ Fradin, chief executive of Adify Corp., whose technology runs ad networks for Forbes and others.

But these media networks — some linking fewer than a dozen hand-picked websites — may have a tough time competing with the larger networks of thousands assembled by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner's AOL.

Those companies have been expanding, too, spending at least $11 billion collectively to buy smaller ad networks and technologies — and in Microsoft's case, also bidding more than $40 billion for Yahoo.

"As our technology has continued to advance, we've gotten better and better," said Lynda Clarizio, president of AOL's emerging Platform A advertising unit. "We can handle a lot of demand from advertisers."

The expansion drive by both sides comes as Internet users increasingly divide their time across scores of sites large and small. Advertisers would rather not deal with thousands of individual websites. Media companies and Internet portals alike are promoting networks as a way to reach larger audiences with "one-stop" ad buys.

So far, the portal ad networks have largely succeeded in selling their affiliates' leftover ad inventory at discounted rates and sharing revenue.

Now, by employing targeting techniques such as matching ads to visitors' surfing habits, those large networks also are stepping up their bid for higher-value ads — the ones that have traditionally gone to sites run by the media companies.