Top publishers including The Guardian, CNN International, Reuters, The Economist and the Financial Times have teamed up to form an advertising alliance in the hope that their combined scale will make them a competitor to Google, Facebook and other social media sites.

The alliance, called Pangaea after the supercontinent that existed around 100m years ago, will pool the publishers collected audience of around 110m readers worldwide so that advertisers can buy space across every network in a single transaction.

Pangaea will also involve the partners sharing their first-party data with advertisers, offering marketers the ability to understand the cross-publisher audience like never before, and to deliver hyper-targeted campaigns.

The alliance will launch in beta next month, with programmatic ad tech company Rubicon Project acting as a delivery platform. Initially the project will be run by a central team from across the various publishers involved, but once it leaves beta, it will be managed by a separate sales team.

“As the world becomes more complex and networked, Pangaea will give advertisers one single programmatic solution from driving influence at scale, allowing them to get cut-through in an increasingly fragmented market using the latest ad serving technology,” said Tim Gentry, global revenue director at Guardian News & Media, and project lead for the Pangaea Alliance.

“Pangaeas uniqueness lies in the quality of its partners. We know that trust is the biggest driver of brand advocacy, so we have come together to scale the benefits of advertising within trusted media environments, which are geared towards delivering cutting-edge creative campaigns in technically advanced formats.”