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Yesterday, ESPN kicked third-party ad networks off its site. Good move, writes Mahalo CEO and Weblogs Inc. founder Jason Calacanis on his blog in 430 words. Here's a version for your ad sales guy to read after lunch while waiting for Salesforce.com pages to load.

Ad networks create conflicts: many people selling your inventory, confusing advertisers. They run ads that people hate. You cannot build a publishing business on the backs of ad networks. They take too much money, 40-50 percent. Your internal sales group will cost 10-25 percent. Under $250,000 a year in advertising? Go for it. Break $250,000, go for an ad sales person. If you are midsized, hire three advertising people. Spend 50 percent of your time going to advertising meetings. Kick out ad networks and replace with something simple like Google AdSense as backfill. Ad networks intimidate small publishers into thinking they can't sell their own inventory — NOT TRUE! All you need is one out of 25 advertisers to say yes.