Jun. 17--The Orange County Register has joined Yahoo's Newspaper Consortium to distribute online content more widely on the Internet and give readers more relevant results when searching for local advertising.

OCRegister.com will continue its job advertising relationship with Monster.com and not Yahoo's HotJobs, which is the most popular consortium tool, used by 73 percent of the newspapers.

Yahoo announced that the Register is one of five newspapers joining the consortium, which was founded in 2006 and now has 814 newspapers from 43 media holding companies. The other new members are the Gazette in Colorado Springs, like the Register owned by Freedom Communications in Irvine; The San Diego Union-Tribune; and The Record and Herald News, both part of the North Jersey Media Group.

Yahoo continues to expand its consortium even as Google has canceled its experiment in newspaper advertising.

"Through this alliance, we offer our advertising customers a very sophisticated level of targeting by demographics, interest categories and ZIP code-level geography," said Douglas S. Bennett, president of Freedom Interactive.

For example, an ocregister.com reader might search for "Ford" and get the most appropriate local car-dealer ads. Those ads could be delivered not only on car-related pages but on any page visited by a user interested in cars, Bennett said.

In addition to the ad search functions, Yahoo will index ocregister.com content so that it gets better ranking on Yahoo's news and information pages when Orange County residents are performing searches, Bennett said.

Yahoo does not release group performance data, but Nat Ives of AdAge estimates the consortium has sold $50 million in Yahoo ad inventory with several million dollars in sales being added each week.

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