They’ll work with you and raise rates (and even raise your percentage of the total take) if you’re a top tier publisher, but usually don’t work with most peon publishers like ourselves.

Not sure what I can tell you about worries of cannibalizing your personal rates or the lowered prices they offer than what you’re charging. If you feel like you can do better on your own, by all means, ditch ‘em. The selling point for me is that they provide access to a much larger pool of potential advertisers and that they only offer a simple text link. If advertisers want a sidebar ad that’s a larger format and mix of text/images, they still have to deal with me. If an advertiser sees that they can get a text link via TLA cheaper than dealing with me directly, so be it, and that’s likely not an advertiser who is going to hang around for the long run anyway.

To be completely and brutally honest, advertisers have been overpaying for ads on poker blogs anyway, so I try not to get too hung up on the price differential. I hear you, as far as potentially getting more, depending on your bartering skills and the interested party, but there’s the potential for bloggers to shoot themselves in the foot in the long run by overpricing their ad inventory, even when it’s seemingly justified by advertisers ponying up the bucks.

Any advice for how to approach TLA to get them to raise my listed rate? According to their handy-dandy pricing tool, I should be getting $45+ for where my ads are placed, but they’re selling them for $25.

Thanks!