LEXIS-NEXIS Offers Online Marketers Half of All U.S. College Students

LEXIS-NEXIS said it soon will be able to offer marketers access to more than half the college students in America.

Under a contract negotiated by a consortium of universities, more than half of all U.S. college and university students will be using LEXIS-NEXIS Academic Universe from Congressional Information Service Inc., to gain access to a subset of the LEXIS-NEXIS information database.

Several thousand sources will be searchable on the system with unlimited, campus-wide access at a cost of under $1.52 per student per year.

For advertisers targeting the college market, LEXIS-NEXIS Academic Universe provides a medium to reach students, the company said.

Real Media, which LEXIS-NEXIS commissioned exclusively to sell and manage all aspects of the site’s advertising, said it expects that once the school year convenes in the fall, the site will be delivering 8 million to 12 million banner ad impressions per month.

MUZE (music database) and CatalogLink (online retail aggregator) are expected to launch ad placements in August. Banners ads are priced at a $45 CPM and sponsor packages are being developed by Real Media.

The LEXIS-NEXIS Academic Universe audience also will be included in Real Media’s Targeted Reach Portfolio of sites that can be aggregated for advertisers to reach college students through local media sites they already traffic. The College Portfolio includes sites run by: The Village Voice, The Boston Phoenix, LA Weekly, Minneapolis City Pages and the Seattle Weekly and the Ministry of Sound site (Europe).

Users of LEXIS-NEXIS Academic Universe, including faculty, will be able to use a standard Web browser.

The multi-million-dollar contract (financial specifics were not disclosed) was negotiated by CIS and SOLINET (Southeastern Library Network), a regional network consortium of Southeastern colleges, universities, and public libraries, which acted as negotiating agent for 23 library consortia and three individual universities. SOLINET will administer the contract and be the billing agent.

The one-year contract covers approximately 53 percent of the estimated FTE (full-time equivalent) enrollment at four-year institutions.

Academic Universe was introduced in August 1997. It was designed to supplant an earlier education program that used proprietary software and telnet connections to access the LEXIS-NEXIS search and retrieval system.

CIS is a wholly owned subsidiary of LEXIS-NEXIS.