How much as a percent of revenue do you think brand sales efforts cost the largest web publishers?

Now factor in turnover associated with operating a network

As for the efficiency of a rep firm buying out inventory and reselling — there is a liquid market for that and the effective cpm for a site like Techcrunch is probably about $2

The Washington post made an unexpected move today. They launched a product called blogroll where they will give certain blogs rotating space on the Washington Post home page, and push advertisers to those blogs. Steve Rubel has good information on what…

Well anyway, I am not sure if it is a good idea or a bad one. I guess in time we will all see. If I get excepted as one of their blogers (if they consider my site a blog in the first place), I’ll see for myself if it is something I can use and how I will consult others to use it if applicable.

It’s really not a question of serving, tracking, or any of the other operational aspects of ad serving for us. It’s more about the selling. As an early stage company, you have two options for selling your ads: do it yourself with a full-time sales staff or outsource it. AdSense tends to make people believe that the entire advertising world is just a question of building up traffic and then letting the ads pour in automatically, but the reality is that a good sell through rate at a good CPM requires a dedicated sales staff, whether it’s internal or external.

By building our own ad system in-house, we can use FM as long as it’s a valuable relationship (which it is), and then if god forbid something goes south, we’ve got the flexibility to plug in other options or do everything ourself. Right now, we’re happy though…

Why not just set your own ad network with some OSS ad server? That’s what FM does it anyway with Phpadnews on the backend.

If blogroll can do it, why not you!!

With regards to FM, the real question for them — I believe — is whether the premiumness of the network they are creating is going to translate into noticeably higher CPMs than standard run-of-site ads in the long term. We think it might, so that’s the theory for now. Since the time we posted that Newsvine article, FM has actually sold almost our entire site out — at good CPMs — and that’s great. Couldn’t have come at a better time either as we’re doing record traffic. If this continues, I’d say FM is worth the 40% for now (other networks can take as much as 60% by the way)… although you’re right that competition can drive this down.

I think what’s good about the strategy you’ve taken at TechCrunch is that you allow for the outsourced sale of targeted CPM ads (by FM) but you are still able to sell sponsorships yourself and keep 100%, as well as other revenue opportunities. In the end, targeted CPM ads (and thus, FM) should only be one component of a revenue stream.