SEATTLE – Faced with the threat of losing more classified ads to online competitors, some newspaper publishers are looking to a Web real-estate information company to help them stay in the game.
Zillow.com said Tuesday that 11 publishers, including Hearst, which owns the Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and MediaNews Group, which owns the Denver Post and San Jose Mercury news, have forged an advertising partnership.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
On Zillow, based in Seattle, Web surfers can list their home for sale or see what it might sell for, and they can ask owners or neighbors for more information about houses on the market.
The 282 newspapers involved in the deal can incorporate some of Zillow’s content and features into their own sites.
Zillow was the fifth-most-visited real estate site in the United States in October, according to data from Nielsen Online. Realtor.com, the site of the National Association of Realtors, got the most traffic, followed by sites operated by Yahoo, Microsoft and Time Warner’s AOL.
Most major newspaper publishers have deals in place with major online employment classifieds companies such as Yahoo’s HotJobs and Monster Worldwide’s Monster.com. Gannett and McClatchy have a stake in a site of their own, CareerBuilder.
But few have deals in place for real estate advertising.
The other newspaper companies working with Zillow are Lee Enterprises, Media General, Morris Communications, Paddock Publications, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, E.W. Scripps, Times-Shamrock Communications, the Journal Register and Day Publishing.
