John Battelle Mirrors Alex Hammer in TechCrunch comments

Related:
Michael Arrington’s Rant - Good but What’s Missing? The User

John Battelle Mirrors Alex Hammer in TechCrunch comments
In today's Michael Arrington TechCrunch post: Federated Media’s Battelle Slams Rival, Hints At Investing In Publishers

TechCrunch comment #18 below is mine and comment #19 below is John's. Michael's response (#24) ignores both of us. (Note 1: the mirroring refers to ad networks generally vs. one company Note 2: I wish there was spell check within comments. I could cut and past into a spell checker but I do not normally take the time to do this).
Alex Hammer
March 21st, 2008 at 7:56 am
I don’t think the first half of this TechCrunch title is accurate in regard to the Battelle interview, to my mind. I read it that Battelle was talking about general industry issues, not at all picking any fight whatsoever with one company (that company he cites I read as indiciative of the general issue, nothing more).

Also, this may be off base (I don’t know) but this TechCrunch piece to me, in places really feels like airing of “dirty laundry”. Not that issues can’t or shouldn’t be aired. It’s not a value judgment, just an observation (perhaps a theory).

John Battelle
March 21st, 2008 at 8:02 am
Hey Mike & all on this thread,
Thanks for the thoughtful coverage. I wanted to clarify one thing, which is in my answer to Stefanie about Glam, I was referring more broadly to all ad networks. We represent, as you know, a portfolio of brands. Ad networks more broadly sell categories - demographics, behaviors, etc. That’s what I think is the flavor of the month. I wrote a very long diatribe about this on my site:
http://battellemedia.com/archives/004330.php
As for deals & rev shares (which Cnet got wrong, the spilt was reversed), I can’t comment on specifics save to say we have given the majority to our partners as you know. It’s very expensive to run a fully scaled, national brand sales and service force, as well as all the technology and infrastructure (finance, ad serving, reporting, biz dev, etc.) a high quality media company needs to run. And it’s true we don’t own our publishing partners. I think that’s a motivator for most of our partners. Happy to talk more at any time, of course!

Alex: Note 3: I could see that the CNET split was wrong (that's a pretty important error in a story on this topic!) but I didn't want to point that out to embarrass anyone until I now see Battelle has corrected that information above.

Sphere: Related Content