We now return to the Young and the Profitless… Apparently Nick got tired of waiting around for Stacey to wise up and Brad to stop using their friendship, and he’s going his own route. That’s right, Nick News Corp is ready to take on Internet advertising on its own with the launch of its niche ad network this week.
The ad network, Worthnet.Fox, is designed to appeal to “a growing class of executives who spend time in myriad global regions, as economic borders dissolve amid international expansion,” as Reuters puts it. The network will focus on financial news and advice.
At launch, they announced that they had 30 partners including MarketWatch, Barron’s and the Dow Jones-owned Wall Street Journal. Since News Corp acquired Dow Jones in December, it seems that the ad network is designed to help Dow Jones.
Of course, this is coming from Reuters, who admits that “The launch of Worthnet.Fox appears to be part of News Corp’s intentions to expand Dow Jones’s international presence as rivals, including Thomson Reuters, consolidate.”
Worthnet.Fox is part of .Fox Networks, a division of Fox International Channels, which puts it in the same subset as the recently acquired Ustream.Fox, a European online and television video advertising network. What, were you expecting them to put these things in the logical place, Fox Interactive Media? No, no—but they do hope to work with FIM.
While this may be well-timed, with the aforementioned consolidation by competitors, it also might have been easier and faster to strike a deal with Yahoo, as they were rumored to be discussing in February.
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