People also ask
In practice
The base is not a spreadsheet of DR numbers; it is institutional memory: for each site — who decides, what they accept, what they charge, how fast they move, what they rejected and why, whether their traffic is real — maintained across campaigns and markets. The operational advantages compound. Speed: a category brief that matches the base goes from brief to pitch list in days, because the qualification already happened and the relationships open conversations a cold email can’t. Fit: the base is searchable by topic, language, audience and format, which makes matching placements to pages a query rather than a hunt.
Leverage: accumulated history with editors (drafts that arrived clean, invoices paid on time) lowers prices and friction for every client after the first. The concentration matters: a base built in one vertical — technology — encodes exactly the knowledge a generalist has to rebuild per client, which is why a specialist’s smaller-but-deeper base beats a generalist’s wider-but-shallower one. The maintenance is the honest part: sites decay, editors leave, traffic cliffs — the base is re-qualified continuously, and a stale entry is worse than none (it burns a pitch).
The buyer’s due diligence question writes itself: is the base yours or a marketplace’s, and how many placements did you place in my category last quarter — because the answer separates an asset from a subscription. The base is also the international mechanism: rebuilt per market in-language, but built once by the team that did the work there — and its size in each market is the honest measure of that market’s readiness.
See also: Publisher relationships, Link prospecting, Marketplaces vs direct publisher relationships.
Related service: International links.
