ChasNote

Wil Harris of Where’s Wil picked up news that FM has signed on a UK ad-sales partner, and interpreted the news as a sign of inadequacy:

“FM has come in for some stick for not necessarily getting the job done. Others have pointed out the slight non-sense of an advertising company taking venture funding to grow – surely revenue from ad sales should do that? Well, it seems that FM is going to take some more help to grow its business. Sources confirmed to me last night, ahead of an official announcement, that Batelle is contracting out sales of UK and European traffic across its network to a company based out of London called Net Communities.”

Here’s the response I posted to his site:

“Hey Wil. I’m the VP of sales for FM. And while I’m always striving to make more money for FM’s partner sites, we’re certainly off to an OK start. Hiring a UK rep firm is a positive sign — we’re expanding our advertiser base, we’re growing revenue, and we’re able to do this because many of our partner sites (Digg especially) have grown their audiences to a size where targeting based on geography can be done scaleably. We just opened our NYC sales office too (this one run by FM staff), which I put into the same bucket as partnering with Net Communities UK. Earlier in my career I worked for the US sales rep firm that handled US advertisers for Nikkei Business Publications (Japan), Grupo Abril (Brazil), CEP Group Tests (France), EMAP (UK) — some of the largest publishers in their respective countries. At the time I repped for them (the early 1990s), they each did more revenue than CNET did when I worked there (early 2000s). Overseas sales partnerships are just part of growing a business.”