Sugar Inc Breaks Up With NBC, Brings Ad Sales In House

Sugar Inc Breaks Up With NBC, Brings Ad Sales In House

Fast growing women-focused blog network Sugar Inc announced that they’ve terminated their year-old ad sales relationship with NBC. All ad sales will now be via an in-house sales team, says the company.

There was speculation that NBC’s recent investment in Blogher, arguably a competitor to Sugar, was to blame. But Sugar CEO Brian Sugar (guess where the company name came from) says this was purely an economic decision. NBC’s cut of ad sales simply got too expensive.

Comscore says the Sugar sites have 4.6 million unique visitors and 24 million page views per month. We’ve heard the company will do around $15 million in revenue this year, with 2/3 of that from advertising. Assuming NBC takes 50% of sales, that’s $5 million Sugar is paying them every year. Bringing sales in-house certainly makes sense.

Sugar is also clearly gearing up to compete with Glam Media, a company that represents other women-focused sites for ad sales. To get there, though, Sugar needs to build up their own sales force. It looks like they’re doing exactly that...

Report: Video Ad Rates Pretty High, Going Higher

A new report from Diffusion Group confirms some of what we've been hearing about online video ad rates. Namely, rates are high for long form professionally-produced video, ie TV on the Web. User-generated video? Not so much, but better than than nothing.

This is very good news for Hulu.com and the TV networks' efforts to make money online, and pretty good news for those producing short-form video for the Web. But we take them with a grain of salt: ad rates vary widely based on the amount of inventory available and numerous other factors. We've heard rates in the $45 - $65 CPM (the cost to reach 1,000 people) range for video on TV network players/sites, for example, and we've heard YouTube is having trouble getting even $15 for overlay ads on the few videos it can actually sell.

All this could change next year if advertisers embrace user-generated video or long form video ad rates go down a bit and become more comparable with TV. Still, these seem like reasonable benchmarks. What's more speculative: Diffusion Group is projecting CPM growth in the future. Nevertheless, here's the data, via TVWeek:

Today's average:
Professional long form video: $40 CPM
Professional short-form: $30 CPM
User-generated video: $15 CPM

Projected for 2013:
Long form: $46 CPM
Short form: $34 CPM

User-gen: $17 CPM

Lazarus Plans to Step Down As Ogilvy CEO at Year End

BY SUZANNE VRANICA AND STEPHANIE KANG

Word Count: 317  |  Companies Featured in This Article: WPP Group

One of Madison Avenue's highest-profile figures, Shelly Lazarus, is stepping down as chief executive of WPP Group's Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide at the end of the year.

Ms. Lazarus, 60 years old, will be succeeded by Miles Young, chairman of Ogilvy & Mather's Asia Pacific region. Ms. Lazarus, one of the handful of women to hold the top job at a global advertising firm, ...