The Associated Press announced yesterday that it will develop an ad-supported mobile service to deliver stories and photos to advanced mobile phones, including the iPhone.
With this service called “Mobile News Network”, people will be able to read local news but also national and international news from AP network.
The service was designed specifically for the iPhone but can be used with other smartphones. Mobile News Network will be organized by ZIP code. I think AP should also think about adding Location Based Services with phones that are GPS-capable, the iPhone isn’t yet, but they’ve been some rumors predicting that Apple will add this functionality in the next generation of this device.
Local ads would be sold by newspapers and also national ads served by ad companies. Mobile advertising companies such as JumpTap, Medio, Google or Yahoo! will be very interested in serving ads on these networks, since the traffic will likely be tremendous.
Each party, news providers and ad sellers will get 50% of the revenue.
This will help struggling newspapers find other sources of revenues.