The network initially launched in Boston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Francisco, Denver and Chicago. CBS will continue to roll out the program over the next several weeks in other major markets, including New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

Jonathan Leess, president and general manager of the CBS Television Stations Digital Media Group, is inviting local social-media sites and bloggers to share in the ad revenue. Leess said the network "opens up exciting new avenues for our advertising partners to efficiently extend their reach to valued local audiences while associating themselves with our CBS brands and content ."

The Network in Action

CBS-owned stations across the country are syndicating local news widgets to blogs and hyper-local sites in the communities they serve. Each widget will feature top local headlines and images with links to the video and text stories on the CBS station's site. Included in the widget is a companion banner advertisement.

The CBS stations will deliver real-time news feeds to the widget, allowing the content on the local partner sites to update 24 hours a day. CBS stations can offer marketers the ability to reach a local audience while remaining attached to CBS station brand and content, the company said.

Owners of the local sites will receive a portion of the advertising revenue generated by the CBS stations, which will be responsible for selling the ad inside each widget. AT&T, North Texas Honda Dealers and Liberty Mutual Insurance are early adopters of the network. CBS did not say what percentage of the revenue bloggers and social-media sites will receive.

How Much Revenue?

The concept of content on geo-targeted widgets is nothing new, but watching a traditional media company serve locally targeted ads through content widgets with a revenue-sharing model is interesting, said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence.

Sterling doesn't doubt the program will attract bloggers and social-media sites. But, he added, it's yet to be determined if the network will generate meaningful revenue for CBS, or anything more than trivial revenue for the sites that feature it. CBS will be competing at some level with AdSense, but is offering more than standard AdSense text ads with its video content.

"CBS is recognizing that the Internet is about distributed audiences and you have to be creative to reach them. You have to pursue a strategy of getting people to come to your sites and reaching people where they may be," Sterling said. "That's what widgets are about: finding users where they are and getting your content in front of them."