Premium Publishers Network: How Italian publishers are joining forces for ad revenue

The original article written by Marek Miller, who will be blogging from the conference, can be read on the forum4editors site. You can follow Marek on Twitter on @Marek_Miller and @forum4editors.

forum4editors: PPN is a consortium, which is supposed to give Italian publishers an opportunity to be more competitive within the online market. Can you tell our readers about the innovation behind PPN?

[GR/CG]: PPN Consortium gives the opportunity to advertisers to reach the most important Italian publishers' sites - repubblica.it, corriere.it, gazzetta.it, stampa.it, ansa.it and more - using 'content matching' technology.

There are two exclusive ways to talk to the audiences of our online properties: invest through our ad agencies (RCS Pubblicità, Manzoni-Gruppo l'Espresso, PubliKompass-LaStampa and more) for display advertising or through PPN Consortium for contextual advertising.

According to online data company Audiweb, RCS and L'Espresso together represent 40 per of the Italian online ad market. How will PPN help you expand?

We will expand, because PPN gives us the perfect knowledge of one of the most popular models of online advertising. In the past, when contextual advertising for our online properties was managed by Google or Yahoo, we didn't know anything about the market, the habits of the consumers, the performances of different strategies of advertisers. Now we can get this kind of information through our partner company, which is building the 'content matching machine' with our help.

How do you invite and convince other publishers to join the platform?

We share the strategical reasons, as a premium publisher, to be part of the PPN. These are even more important than the very good ad revenue results achieved in the first months by PPN.

Recently, a similar joint venture between Silvio Berlusconi's Mediaset TV and publishing company Mondadori was proposed. Do you consider this venture as a threat to the possible expansion of your project?

Mediaset and Mondadori are both owned by Berlusconi, and the joint venture simply represents a new online ad agency, to better address the online display advertising market. Mediaset and Mondadori, with their online publishing products, still remain perfect candidates to be part of PPN.

Do you think Google is newspapers' friend or enemy? Do you believe your ad consortium can be a real competitor to Google?

We do not believe that PPN is a Google competitor, because our consortium is open only to the publishing companies with an emphasis on their own content. Google has a different value proposition from us.

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