Tell that to John Gruber over at DaringFireball - He makes $6500 a week just from posting one ad in the RSS feed. If he can gross over $300K a year on a niche Apple blog without a sales team, can you imagine what a sales team could do at SO?

He also sells three ad spots on his mostly weekly podcast for $6000 each. He’s a one man business grossing over 1 million a year without a sales team.

I don't need to imagine, I've been in adtech for 12 years and built companies and sales teams. DaringFireball is 1 example of an extremely tiny minority that can earn that today after building up an audience and reputation for decades.

It doesn't just scale up linearly and getting to $10M is magnitudes more work, especially if they're going to place their own requirements on campaigns and creatives. Even buzzfeed went back to programmatic ads with layoffs because their custom articles didn't sustain the business.

> He’s a one man business grossing over 1 million a year without a sales team

1) He has a sales person that sells ads on his podcast: http://neat.fm

2) Extrapolating from published rates is not very reliable. Nobody except John Gruber and his accountant knows how many sponsors really pay the sticker price.

But... Shouldn't smaller sites find it *harder to gain attention of publishers and obtain bespoke ads?

In my mind major respected operation like SO should have an easier job. I interpreted OP to imply "nobody is big enough to run bespoke ads".

I guess I don't have metrics for it and my impression that's clearly a more reliable investment of one's advertising dollars is a mistaken one :-/

It’s the whole “1000 True Fans” method of making money. If your company can stay small, it doesn’t take as much to have a sustainable “lifestyle business”.

> Shouldn't smaller sites find it *harder to gain attention of publishers and obtain bespoke ads?

I suspect there's a demand problem: while a bigger site might be better at gaining the attention of those buying non-network ads, there may not be a sufficient volume that is even considering buying ads in that market to support a larger site, and changing that takes either more or bigger sites than even SO.

>usually means less total revenue for the site if that's all they run.

Does it? If native ads were blocked less, couldn't these units reach more eyes than RTB trash?

Native is a format, RTB is ad transactions and delivery. They're not mutually exclusive. If you mean an entirely custom format then that reach is offset by the higher production and impression costs, which results in less overall demand.

Liquidity becomes an issue, which is why Reddit is a good example. They also use adzerk and built their own custom self-serve ad network but they make very little money compared to similar traffic using standard programmatic demand.

Native as in self-served non-RTB first-party, whatever.

That would be the reddit example, just low overall demand for something like that. They could try it, but probably already did the analysis to see its not worth it.

I don't think demand would stay low if other sites started doing the same thing.

Companies basically have to advertise, and they'll buy time with whatever outlet serves the eyes they want to reach. Ford Motors isn't gonna let MyPillow.com take over ESPN.com on Super Bowl day just because they don't like the advertising provider, method, or architecture.

You're right, but it's impossible to overstate how uncooperative publishers are. They refuse to work with each other and every major publisher-run ad exchange has failed. Maybe privacy and data regulations will finally push them to change.