Local advertising is about to change in several markets as a result of the extended partnership between Yahoo and Gannett. The companies have been partners for a little over a year but recently decided to extend their partnership to include all 81 Gannett print publications in the U.S. except for USA Today and all 19 of the company’s broadcast stations.

The local advertising market is growing as the value of digital increases for local businesses. Lem Lloyd, the VP of North America Channel Sales at Yahoo, told us that because local advertisers are trying to make their ad dollars work smarter for them, they are shifting their spend from traditional advertising to digital.

“Their audiences are already online spending most of their time online, and they’re trying to match their ad spend with the amount of time that folks are spending now on the Web,” he said.

Through the expanded partnership, local advertisers will have more digital opportunities. They will be able to take advantage of Yahoo’s targeting capabilities as well as the company’s large inventory.

“If you’re a local business in one of Gannett’s markets… when you talk with your sales rep at the station, now they’ll be able to offer you access to all the 100s of 1,000,000s of users that are on Yahoo,” said Lloyd.

As local advertisers, how can you see this partnership benefiting your business? Let us know.

For Yahoo, the extended partnership will bring in advertisers that would not have previously been possible. This means that Yahoo’s reach will expand even further while also bringing in more revenue for the company.

“It’s a fabulous opportunity for us to get more demand from these 1,000s and 1,000,000s of local businesses across the United States,” Lloyd pointed out.

He went on to say that the companies hoped their expanded agreement would have the same success that their previous one has had. Yahoo is also excited to see what opportunities their new advertisers will bring.

“We hope to see lots of new types of advertisers on Yahoo that we weren’t seeing before,” said Lloyd.

The companies are expecting this expansion to be fully integrated into all of Gannett’s broadcast markets by February 2012.