I’m not privy to the contract between TC and FM but I suspect that they only sell the impressions that you send to them.

If that’s the case, the solution to your predicament is pretty simple:

Automate your entire ad sales process.

Not just 125×125 square buttons but the whole thing. Whatever you can’t sell, send it to FM (or whomever your next partner is).

From my vantage point, FM provides two things that benefit TC:

1. Access to a broader pool of advertisers – esp. the large agencies from Madison Av.

2. An automated self-service system – payments, ad management, reporting etc.

Whilst it may be prohibitively expensive to build out your own sales team to achieve (1), I think you can provide (2) relatively easily.

Hire a couple of developers to build it or use an off-the-shelf white-labeled self-service system like Trafficspaces, Adready, or even one of the Wordpress plugins (on second thoughts, the Wordpress plugins might not be up to scratch).

“about a third of our revenue comes from ad sales”

I assume that most of these sales are for ad campaigns in the “> $5000″ range. By rule of thumb, there is potentially a third of your revenue that is in the “< $5000″ range that is being left on the table.

Understandably, your direct ad sales team/person needs to focus on the bigger tickets but with an automated self-service system, you need not give half of your revenue to Google and FM.

Just my two cents.
Mark
Trafficspaces.com

Mike Arrington asks “Is It Time To Swith Ad Partners?”
HELL YES! Not just “HELL YES!” but think of something far more profane and that is what I meant to say.
Mike, why, in this day and age of falling infrastructure prices would…

We should talk

http://advertis...site=techcrunch

Adready is great, but they have a huge set up fee and still take a % reve share.

Go with a large established partner, or buy other blogs and then build your own sales force. You need reach to get size, else a partner that has a brand much reach larger than yours. WSJ could sell ads for you, Glam/Brash, or CNet/CBS. Smaller players like FM will not cut it at your level.

Lot of long term happy publishers on their network- so Michael should seriously consider Brash men network. They will seriously hurt FM and others as they expand men.

Networks are attractive to large advertisers because they bring scale within a niche market.

If you have to learn this lesson the hard way then go right ahead. We will all watch as your ads move from huge brand name companies to less well known and lower paying brands.

How much do you really know about why the big brands spend ALL of the money they do with TechCrunch? I will bet you that the majority of the money they spend is because you are part of buy that must have the reach that Tech Crunch alone cannot provide.

But hire yourself a sales team, pay them a bunch of money, go several months with much lower revenues and then have your sales team tell you what I just told you. What common sense should tell you.

My guess is that you realized that you need Federated a lot more than they need you and you just cant handle it.

Could’nt agree with you more mate!

Good one.

No way.

When you become a market leader, time to cut the cord and branch out on your own as you have now begun to subsidize other small fries.

Interesting. Certainly makes good business sense.

He’s got some growing up to do.

LOTS.

This is tantamount to public bullying, all-the-while eliciting your competitors to do him a better deal. I’m sure you’ve figured this out.

You’ve got an online empire that does NOT have to rely on him, any more than Mister Gates’ ultimate future relied on Big Blue.

In both cases, “it was fun (????) while it lasted.” But right away, the first time I saw the Federated website, I knew that you were building the online equivalent that Billy Ziff, et al., did with paper publishing back in the day.

Go do it. Be fruitful and multiply.

MA’s arrogance will always be his downfall.

sigh~jk