But as any traditional media outlet will tell you, the ROI on a sales person (or staff), varies widely. A unique or remarkable product is only the beginning of a successful media sale. There are many examples of the #2 media outlet in a market out billing the #1 outlet, (television, radio, newspaper). In the sales world the equation is never as simple as: remarkable product verifiable audience = great ROI on sales.

And can you imagine busy media planners and buyers dealing with individual sales folks from every well-read blog in the world? Traditional media outlet figured out long ago that sales model was unworkable. Blog publishers will as well. IMHO

I continue to be fascinated by the gap between what people say about AdSense and my own experience with the program. I certainly don’t find that I need a dedicated ad sales person to figure out how to monetize my blog through the Google AdSense program, and with approx 5% click-thru rate and an effective CPM across the last 30 days of approx. $9.00, it works fine for me (*) and can work well for other bloggers too, better than it’s probably working now.

The key to any advertising is to recognize whether you have a *unique* proposition, however. TechCrunch is so darn popular because Mike and his team do have a unique angle on things so it’s always engaging and interesting reading. That’s something that can be leveraged by ad sales and monetized differently to, say, a “lots of links to gizmodo and boing boing” blogger blog that someone does hoping to see a trickle of traffic and some ads.

As long as Federated Media focuses on these blogs with unique profiles, it will indeed continue to raise the value of the real estate it’s representing on each site, and if you don’t think that 60% of something big is worth more than 100% of something small, Mike, you needed to have the experiences I”ve had in the startup world, where we learned pretty quickly that 100% of wishing definitely does not outperform even 10% of something big.

Further, my understanding is that blogs that are part of the Federated Media network retain the right to sell their own ads, use AdSense, Omakase, Overture, whatever, in addition to the FM blocks being sold by their sales team, so if the % is a problem, why not just have less FM ads and delve into selling your own advertising blocks anyway?

(*) Why yes, I *do* have permission from Google to reveal specific AdSense figures from my site. Comes of writing about Google and gaining permission to share exactly how my AdSense account works and what I do to maximize my income. See http://www.findability.info/ to learn more, if you’re curious.

Of course, Arrington’s in a unique position, but given the poor way he handled his relationship with his web designer not too long ago and statements like this, he doesn’t sound like a very good client.