Four media giants, Gannet Co., Hearst Corp., the New York Times and Tribune Co. teamed up for an online ad-sales venture on a national level, in what will be known as quadrantONE. The partnership is the second of its kind, after Yahoo’s initiative last year, and is intended to offer online advertising campaigns to the tens of millions of visitors on the U.S. market.

QuadrantONE will include over 120 papers, and among them, big names like The Los Angeles Times, The Houston Chronicle or The Boston Globe, and will aim at 50 million unique visitors a month. The venture most likely came as a response to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo’s attempts on the online ads market, but we’ll just have to wait and see if quadrantONE will prove to be lucrative.

The point of creating one single company is not only to represent the best interests of all the partners, but also to ease the work of advertisers that wish to buy space in any of the newspapers affiliated to quadrantONE without having to contact all the companies individually. If the marketer “can make one phone call to a portal or 100 in local markets to get the same audience, the answer… would be a no-brainer,” said quadrantONE interim Chief Executive Dana Hayes, The Wall Street Journal reports.

“This network will create an easy and effective way for national and regional advertisers to buy premium newspaper websites,” Houston Chronicle Publisher and President Jack Sweeney said on the newspaper’s official website. “Reaching a large, high-quality audience effortlessly is a great benefit for both the advertising community and local sites like chron.com and our millions of monthly visitors.”

All the partners in the quadrantONE venture will assign a certain percentage of its own online advertising space to the quadrantONE inventory. Besides the founding members, other companies across the country are expected to join the online ad-sales venture, and that includes not only newspapers, but also TV networks and media websites.