ROI of inbound marketing (aka, problems with media business model)

Amazing piece on HubSpot’s blog by business journalist Dan Lyons entitled Why I’ve Left the Media Business.

It is a great, if somewhat damning, quick insight into the media business and how it is holding on to a failing business model, namely advertising.

The money quote is here:

At my first meeting with HubSpot, they told me about one of their customers, a company that used to spend $800,000 a year running newspaper ads but now spends $12,000 a year for a subscription to HubSpot and gets better results.

OK, so we don’t know what the “better results” are so we can’t calculate a clear ROI (that was just linkbait), but the point is made: Running with your own content and drawing people to your company is rapidly replacing the shotgun approach of trying to reach everyone, everywhere with advertising.