The CBS Television Stations group is trying to build on its local strengths by offering a revenue-sharing partnership with local bloggers and social media sites in the CBS Local Ad Network. The CBS O&O stations are providing real-time local news with top headlines and video links with one banner ad. widgets that will allow local bloggers and hyper-local sites in their areas to sign up. The local sites can place up to three sponsored link boxes per page. The stations sell the ads; the local site gets an undisclosed cut.

But CBS isn’t managing the network, which has rolled out already in Boston, Dallas, San Francisco, Chicago and Denver; instead, it’s being administered by Syndigo, a new Seevast division set up to manage verticals for publishers. At the launch, CBS had ad deals in place with AT&T (NYSE: T) at two stations in Chicago and Los Angeles, local Honda dealers in the Dallas area, and Liberty Mutual Insurance in Boston. CBS will continue the rollout of hyperlocal features for stations in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, among other areas, over the next few weeks. Release.

Staci adds: Syndigo may want to work a tad on its marketing given this line ... member benefits include “increased credibility.” The network also is only available for sites “written in English.” Payment is 45 days after the calendar month; payments that don’t exceed $50 will roll over until they do. The contract runs one year. As far as I can tell—and I may be missing something in the fine print—members have to sign up before they are told the rev share amount.

Update: Jeff Jarvis dug some more details out of CBS (NYSE: CBS). He spoke with Jonathan Leess, president and GM of the CBS station digital group, and Aaron Radin, SVP-ad sales and biz dev: “I had to pull numbers out of them like baby teeth. They’re telling the bloggers to expect an effective CPM of about 50 cents but they quickly acknowledge that they’re subsidizing and backfilling the network, which is brand new. That is, they’re not yet selling the high-value ads and they’re not selling out, so they are putting in lower-value advertising in some cases and throwing in a subsidy on top. So that’s the net-net bloggers can expect today. But that’s not the value they’re selling to advertisers. That, they said, is more like a $10 CPM (though all life is negotiable). Compare that with $8-20 CPMs on CBS domain banner ads and $16-25 on video inventory. If they can sell a CPM approaching a double digit for local blogs and sell through enough inventory, that could be healthy.” They serve about 20-25 million videos a month, half through their own sites, half through Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) syndication. 

• CBS Creates Cross-Platform Ad Sales Unit