QuadrantONE - the silence is deafening

QuadrantONE, Tribune and Gannett's advertising network of newspapers, has been conspicuously absent from recent news from each of the companies.  Ad networks have been a strategy du jour for addressing the desire of national advertisers to reach audiences across the extraordinarily fragmented Internet.  They often have capability that individual sites can't, such as re-marketing and advanced behavioral targeting.  It can also allow a big advertiser to buy on very small sites economically.  It would seem that hundreds have launched in the last year for this or that niche. 

However QuadrantONE has been shockingly silent.  Gannett mentioned Captivate in their most recent statistical report, but not QuadrantONE.  QuadrantONE hired a new CEO, and very little has been mentioned.  Gannett hasn't updated the fact sheet they post on the home page to reflect the new CEO.  Tribune doesn't even list them as a partner on their home page, that I could find.  

This leads me to believe that QuadrantONE is not exactly meeting expectations.

The reality of the situation is that ad networks are harder than most would guess.  There's more to it than just assembling a list of sites that you can buy across.  Cox seemed to understand this when they bought adify, a technology provider that can power ad networks.  

Centro's recent purchase of RealCities is a pretty solid example of how people outside the industry can grow enough to swallow ventures newspapers try on their own.