Yahoo ads on target?

It's a shame that newspapers didn't see targeted advertising coming around the bend - why else are they partnering with Yahoo and letting Yahoo do it for them?

Clearly it's better to offer ads on websites based on the user's behavior and interests, rather than a shotgun-at-the-side-of-the-barn approach of whoever shells out the bucks gets a display ad on the homepage. But what if papers had pooled their resources years ago, created some online technology that was shared by the collective, that let them offer targeted advertising on their sites? I suppose it would have had to be flexible with whichever content management systems papers use, but if Yahoo is doing it, it is possible.

Yahoo clearly does search better than the online staffs at any paper, but that just means it's all the more important to have expertise in the search engine area. Why don't media companies have the ability to easily track users as they navigate their web sites, and show ads based on things they are more likely to click on or read or search for? Why do they need to outsource it to Yahoo?
We're old hands at selling advertising, even to targeted market segments, based on zip code or other demographic data. But apparently we're late on the bus as far as slicing and dicing demographic groups of online readers.

The larger issue, of course, is how do you make money online by offering news content? Perhaps one question is: what kind of news content would people actually pay for or advertisers line up in droves to be associated with? I think the type of news product that newspapers are used to doing, e.g. text-heavy stories of 200-1200 words, with some photographs and occasional graphics, is only somewhat valuable online. Shorter is better, it seems, and images, graphics and video content play better to the eye.

But that's really for another post. I need to find other stories about these Yahoo partnerships...