From PC, via SAI:

AOL-owned TMZ is firing its AOL sales staff. But I am not sure if the AOL sales staff was all that comfortable selling TMZ to their advertisers.

Rafat Ali is correct when reading between the lines about the reasons.  TMZ’s founding editor Alan Citron (who is now with Buzznet, by the way) summarized the situation as such:

• There’s too much inventory to sell.
• AOL sales people lean too much Advertising.com.
• Sales people don’t sell the individual sites as brands enough.

But, this is really over-simplifying it.  The main issue would be TMZ’s raciness.  No sane advertiser would openly put TMZ on its insertion order.  So TMZ actually needs run of network campaigns.  Yes, PerezHilton does land the major sponsor here and there, that is enough to support a so-called one-man operation, but PerezHilton and TMZ (both amazing franchises) are different, in that TMZ is part of AOL and at $15M in annual revenues, it is hard to convince enough fortune 500 advertisers or top tier ad agencies to include it on their ad buys.

I faced the same challenge when IGN bought AskMen, we had racy content (relative to IGN), so the IGN sales team - far and away a better machine than I (who was selling AskMen inventory) - would hesitate to pitch us out of fear of scaring the marketers.

Will TMZ fare better as a stand alone company?  Not sure.

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