Jason Calacanis made a blog post yesterday about how ad networks suck. Yeah, tell me something I don't know. For years they've been taking half the money, delivering lower and lower CPM's, and you need to go four deep just to fill your inventory.
Of course, when you're a small publisher, you're stuck. He suggests after a certain traffic level, you hire someone to sell for you. We're not at that threshold, obviously. When you're small, you have the unfortunate situation that you can't sell enough at a reasonable commission to hire a contractor. You also want to concentrate on your content and coding and whatever, not selling.
This is a crappy place to be. Even selling at the crappy rates of the networks, with commission to the sales contractor, we'd increase our own revenue by 75% or more. Sell it at rates that most would argue it's really worth, and we'd double or triple our revenue.
Economy of scale is a brutal reality. It's actually that reality that makes the ad networks exist at all. In any case, we're trying to work the problem, and find a solution.
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