The equation is pretty simple: it all boils down to finding enough buyers. Note that my original comment said “relatively few buyers” — ESPN may have a lot more interested buyers than a local TV station, but it also has a LOT more inventory to sell. Two or three orders of magnitude more inventory, in fact. Selling all of that at top dollar rates is going to be near-impossible, and takes much more man-power than network ads do.

I’ll take fewer ads to produce / display at a higher rate any day.

PS: I doubt ESPN has few buyers, but good call on the quote

The fundamental problem that they have is that they have loads of inventory (probably billions of page views a month), relatively few buyers, and an insistence on having a higher price. What will happen is that ESPN will now force advertisers to buy ads at 10x the rate, but will end up selling 10x less of them (or massively overdeliver, effectively lowering the CPM). In the end, their cost of sales will go up while their total revenue will probably stay flat or dip.

I also thought that Ms. Millard’s comment (”we haven’t even established the value of our medium, and all of a sudden it’s about price”) was quite funny: if we don’t know the value of the medium yet, then why are big brands like ESPN insisting on a certain price for their ads?