A great post on the Buzzmachine by Jeff Jarvis discusses Glam’s networked business model. Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch offers a counter view arguing that since they don’t own the pages they will lose in the end.

I think that both maybe right, but it will depend on the circumstances. Distributors have always made their money on new/less well known content producers and made small or negative margins on powerful stars. The issue is in the selection of the segments and the partners. If the niches are small enough then whoever emerges as a star won’t have the scale to manage selling ads. If the niches are large enough for a star producer to reach scale then they may lose them.

And as for losing them to competing networks, that might happen, but it will depend on the quality of the results that the advertising network can produce. Adsense kicks butt compared to Yahoo and other competitors so people stay with Google. If Yahoo or someone starts delivering better results then people will switch.

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