Guardian.co.uk Brings US Ad Sales In-House, No Longer Using Reuters

Yes, MediaWeek’s report is true. Guardian News & Media is no longer using Reuters to sell US advertising. Guardian.co.uk switched from selling low-CPM US ads through ValueClick (NSDQ: VCLK) to using Reuters as part of its Reuters Affiliate Network last February 2008. Now, however, it has added five staff in New York to sell its own ads, alongside our publisher ContentNext.

Six in 10 of Guardian.co.uk’s 29.8 million uniques came from outside its native UK in January, a large proportion from the US (5.5 million in October). British news media, finding accidental audiences from across the pond in the online age, began also seeking US ad dollars last year – Times Online tapped News Corp (NYSE: NWS) stablemate WSJ.com’s ad sales team; Telegraph.co.uk Johnston Press and Bauer sell through AdGent 007 and Mail Online was due to both target US advertisers and launch a New York printed newspaper; Guardian.co.uk was also using Ad2One to sell ads specific to Singapore, Australia and Ireland.

GNM hired former WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive publisher and CEO Caroline Little (pictured) to its board as a US adviser in July and named her north America CEO in December as it sharpened its US focus (Little also sits on ContentNext’s board). Reuters’ Affiliate Network seems barely to have grown since inception, listing only 11 blogs on its content distribution roster.

Update Guardian Media Group has today submitted its response to the Digital Britain review on the country’s media landscape: the company calls for action on the imbalance of search engines like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) profiting from original content but not creating any and warns that an enlarged BBC Worldwide-Channel 4 JV would be damaging to commercial media and could ultimately undermine public service content. Timesonline and PG have more.

Disclosure: paidContent:UK publisher ContentNext is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian News & Media.