When it comes to real estate ad networks – Zillow has Yahoo! Real Estate & hundreds of newspapers. Trulia has CNNMoney. Realtor.com has MSN. Realtor.com just announced their deal with BlockShopper.com yesterday.
I think, over the next 12-24 months, we will see a race between Zillow, Trulia, and Move (Realtor.com) to sign up the next wave of niche real estate sites and media outlets to their respective ad networks. Building an inside sales team to sell ads is an extremely expensive undertaking, but required to reach agents all over the country. Most niche sites that have traffic likely don’t have enough traffic & ad impressions to warrant hiring their own sales team. And let’s be honest — most of those companies would rather spend their time and effort building more cool features and growing their traffic than managing a sales team. But of course they also need to make money – so having another party handle their ad inventory makes sense.