SpotRunner Ousts 115 Employees. It’s For The Good Of The Company

by Jason Wilk on November 3, 2008

Co-founder and CEO of SpotRunner, Nick Grouf, has announced that the company has laid off around 30% of their staff, or 115 people.
Majority of the layoffs come from the local search advertising arm as the economy has scared away their local merchants who SpotRunner targets to sell television time to.
As the company moves towards signing on bigger clients who are less prone to a downturn, they had no choice but to lay down the axe.
SpotRunner will not be hitting the deadpool anytime soon though. They just raised a fresh $51M in may and they are bringing in revenue.

BloggyBoy

Another blog post speculates that their burn rate is 2 million per month and revenues are slim and do not come close to covering expenses. They will not be able to sign bigger clients (at least clients that are not investors) because bigger clients are wise to their higher air time fees. Also canned ads are a fad. Other canned ad or template companies will suffer the same dearth of business. Competitor CheapTVSpots produces custom-made TV and web ads and airs them locally, regionally, nationally and internationally for less. Cheap TV Spots is hiring while the blog-hyped hacks have lay offs and executive exoduses. I think what it says about the real state of the TV advertising business is that quality still sells and blog spin can't float the boat of flawed business models, anymore.

jason

Absolutely right BloggyBoy. SpotRunner has only tough times to look forward to. Most notably, the fact that Google is going to be placing much higher emphasis on TV, radio and other forms of advertising for both small and big business in 2009. They are looking beyond search dollars and Spotrunner will not be able to compete with this being their only business model. I wish them the best, have friends in the company, but good nite.