LIONshare® is a platform that makes fragmented local media easily identifiable and accessible to companies and retailers looking to aggregate advertising buys in different markets. For news sites, there is a database of publisher profiles that puts your ad info a click away from potential advertisers.

The free planning platform in beta was introduced recently by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute and Lion Digital Media.

In an article in MarketingNW.com, Brian Steffens of RJI wrote, “For many local news websites, LIONshare provides their first opportunity to be a part of national and regional advertising campaigns. 'As the news websites roll out new products and content sections, the platform will serve as a powerful marketing tool, allowing thousands of media planners to view a site’s continually updated capabilities,' said Randy Picht, RJI executive director and former news executive. More than 2,000 independent publishers and dozens of local publishing groups—totaling thousands more local sites—already are included in the LIONshare database."

Catherine Payne, content producer for the National Association of Newspapers, outlined the new platform's four key components:

• LIONshare® divided the U.S. into 418 local marketing zones of population centers of more than 50,000 people. Each zone includes a ranking of every local media website.
• Its proprietary mapping and matching logic pulls detailed data from about 7,200 local media websites. Each has an assigned, unique geo footprint to show its in-market coverage down to the zip-code level.
• Publisher profiles cover all ad units: desktop, email, mobile, tablet and video. Advertisers and media planners can access the profiles.
• A planning wizard uses the profiles and footprints to pull matches for an advertising campaign request for proposal into a working media plan.

Publishers can check to see if they have a LIONshare profile by logging into lionshare.media. If you do not have a profile, enter your information which wil be verified by LIONshare. The profiles can be updated as necessary.