WebProNews

Seventeen more newspapers signed on with Yahoo to participate in its classifieds program where HotJobs provides the job listings. Though the New York Times itself has not elected to join Yahoo's newspaper consortium, several of the papers it owns have decided to tie their fortunes to Yahoo.

The latest figures note Yahoo has about 415 daily papers and 140 weeklies participating in the effort, according to AP. Their arrangement provides the newspapers with wholesale pricing for placing listings on HotJobs, giving the papers room to sell online job classifieds at a profit.

An option to have Yahoo serve advertising on those newspaper websites should be available some time in 2008. Yahoo rolled out a long-awaited upgrade to its contextual ad system this year, with a ranking model that makes it work more like industry leader Google's does.

Profitability at various levels for the consortium has not been enough to entice the biggest news publishers to join on with Yahoo. It has been suggested that Gannett and Tribune want to create their own ad network, rather than share any portion of revenue with a third party.

follow me on Twitter