ChasNote

The Digg discussion about Digg’s sales strategy and FM’s business model inspired Battelle to reiterate why he founded FM last spring (from the FM Blog):

“Perhaps the most common criticism of the FM model is that once a site gets to some scale - a figure of one or two million pageviews a month is often cited - that site should leave FM and hire its own salesforce. It sounds smart, but in fact it doesn’t consider any number of factors which go into the reality of running a sales-driven media business. Sure, if you want to run a traditional media business - where 10-15% of the costs are in content creation, and 85-90% of the costs are in stuff that have nothing to do with content - well, go right ahead. But be prepared to be surprised when your margins are consistently in the red. Have you hired a finance person? A traffic person? A business development chief? How about collections? IT? Operations? I’m guessing that many sites prefer to focus on what they do best, and let us focus on the stuff we do best. Not to mention, the advertisers out there have very little time to have 50 meetings with 50 sales folks from 50 different sites, each with 1-2 million pageviews. That model does not scale. (And, by the way, good luck hiring those 50 sales people. They are nearly as scarce as good developers these days, and just as expensive.)