In the end, there were winners on the Romney campaign: the firms tied to Mitt Romney's aides.

With the Federal Election Commission posting the most recent 2012 campaign finance reports, a clearer picture has emerged as to how the Republican presidential nominee spent the hundreds of millions of dollars he raised. It quite literally paid to be part of the Romney universe.

American Rambler, a media firm run by Stuart Stevens, Russ Schriefer and Eric Fehrnstrom (all media strategists for Romney), received more than $234 million in payments from the campaign. That total included nearly $189 million for "placed media" and $16 million for "online advertising" -- the actual costs of buying airtime and space on the Internet. When the firm bought television ads, it also took a cut, pocketing 15 percent of those payments.

The firm made plenty of dough doing other things as well. There was $9.1 million for polling, $8.67 million for strategy consulting, $8.8 million for media production, nearly $2.4 million for communications consulting and $548,000 for "media placement fees."