AP TO LAUNCH NEW ON-LINE AD OFFERING.

While not the first time that The Associated Press has entered the advertising business (who can forget AP AdSEND?), the news cooperative said at a media event last Thursday that in July it will begin selling advertising against wire stories that it hosts on its own servers.

The new service, called "AP Custom News," will be offered to newspaper publishers for use on their sites and the wire service will split any ad revenue with the publishers on a 50-50 basis. What the news cooperative called "premium partners" could license the use of the site and receive 100 percent of the ad revenue.

The wire service has been meeting with ad agencies in preparation for the new offering, highlighting its ability to both micro-target and geo-target ads, as well as the fact that it will truly be a multi-media effort, with an on-line video component as well as mobile access. The A.P. released an upgraded Apple iPhone application last week that includes push notification.

In other on-line ad news, the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium said last week that it had added five more newspapers, bringing its total participation up to 592 HotJobs affiliates and 160 papers that are using APT, Yahoo's ad management platform that was launched last September.

The new affiliates include Southern California's Orange County Register and The Gazette of Colorado Springs, Colo. (the two largest Freedom papers), The Record and the Herald News of the North Jersey Media Group, and the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Though it didn't provide any specifics, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week said it was "one of the most successful partners" in the Consortium. It did say that the alliance allows it to "target nearly 70 percent of the on-line audience" in its Designated Market Area (DMA) and that together, the paper and Yahoo reach 3.2 million local users every month, with more than 1.2 billion page views combined.

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