News Corp's Fox Network to launch Latin American online advertising network

Mumbai: Building on the network of websites that came bundled with his $5.2-billion acquisition of Dow Jones and Co., Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is looking to introduce a global online advertising network to sell financial advertising.

According to a statement by the company, Worthnet.Fox will sell ads for the international versions of Barron's Online, The Wall Street Journal Online and Marketwatch.com, as well as other sites not owned by News Corp. Fox Networks helps in marketing unsold advertising space on websites outside of the United States.

The network allows clients to place ads on all the sites at once, without affecting ads in the US and Japan where the Journal's digital operation already has sales teams in place. Hernan Lopez, president of .FOX Networks says that this is being done with a view to enhance sales in emerging markets, especially Latin America.

The New-York based unit of News Corp. runs Internet ad sales outside the US for 46,000 public companies worldwide, of which 20,000 are in emerging markets, said Lopez.
.FOX Networks had bought a majority stake in the UK-based Utarget, an online video advertising network, to better serve the European market. Utarget.

Fox was acquired by .Fox Networks in March 2008. The launch of Worthnet.Fox is being widely seen as News Corp's effort to expand Dow Jones's international presence in the wake of consolidation by rivals such as Thomson Reuters.

The company is expecting WorthNet to deliver around 20 per cent of the total revenue of .FOX Networks by the end of 2008, and seeks to put luxury brands in front of 'new, global affluent consumers'. News Corp. is allocating 10 sales people from the total .Fox staff of 190 toward this project, under which the network will also work with 25 sites that do not belong to the company.

These include finance sections of web portals, and websites owned by non-American newspapers. .

FOX represents around 650 sites, which makes it smaller than rival ad networks like Time Warner's Advertising.com, which boasts over 10,000 publisher clients, and ValueClick, which places ads on diverse websites.

Industry sources and advertisers feel that the network's focus on finance could prove to be a USP that differentiates it from competitors such as Advertising.com and ValueClick Inc.