Valleywag
great moments in journalism
-
online advertising
The death of conversational marketing
An unproar in the world of tech blogs is uncovering a broader fault line between writers and advertisers. Om Malik's GigaOm and his other blogs have dropped their outside ad-sales firm, Federated Media, a startup run by John Battelle. Federated isn't just another ad network, nor is Battelle just another entrepreneur; he helped start Wired and The Industry Standard and an author of a book about Google, thinks that the future of marketing is conversations. And he launched Federated around that notion. Rather than shouting at readers with ads, marketers will use blogs to engage with their readers — and pay handsomely for the privilege. That's his theory, at any rate, which he is expounding in a forthcoming book. More » -
online advertising
Federated Media slashes rates to $5 CPM
John Battelle has his own plan for riding out the holiday ad-buying slump. The founder of online-advertising network Federated Media, which brokers ads for sites like Boing Boing, GigaOm, and Dooce, can't fire writers, but he can cut the price of their ads. John, be careful. Your inbred network is made up of bloggers who are also endorsers, who also shill their own products. Your list of clients is months out of date — it includes Digg and Fark, who long ago dropped Federated. Cut ad rates too carelessly and your Rube Goldberg business model may backfire. I mean this as the highest compliment: If anyone can lay himself off by accident, that someone is John Battelle. Here's the spam that Federated sent to bloggers this morning: More » -
politics
Valley homophobes still drafting Yes on Prop 8 response ad
BoomTown reporter Kara Swisher rappelled from a skylight at Jerry Yang's secret hideout to score this draft copy of an ad, in which a bunch of tech bigwigs come out in favor of gay marriage — or at least in opposition to Proposition 8, a California state ballot initiative which would ban it. No Valley company in its right mind would be seen opposing gay marriage, so why bother? More » -
mark frauenfelder
Boing Boing founder's directory of wonderful ads
Mark Frauenfelder launched bOING bOING, an ink-on-paper zine, in 1988. He did the artwork for Billy Idol's 1993 Cyberpunk album, using a Mac instead of a photo studio. Frauenfelder joined Wired when that was considered a foolish move by media professionals. Later he resurrected Boing Boing as a website, then again as a blog in 2000. He's now editor-in-chief of Make magazine. Does this guy have an unlimited supply of cool? Not unless he learns to say no to advertisers who co-opt him. More » -
great moments in journalism
New York Times reporter says he's an unwitting Dell shill
Marc Santora, the New York Times reporter who appears in ads for Dell's DigitalNomads site, says he received no compensation for the ad, which came from an interview Santora did for Big Think, a website backed by Facebook investor Peter Thiel. What appears to have happened: Dell or its ad agency, Federated Media, created the ad for Dell's DigitalNomads, using a clip from Santora's Big Think video. In a comment, Big Think cofounder Peter Hopkins says that Dell is a sponsor of his site, but the ad does not mention Big Think. (The Big Think interview was also published to YouTube, and DigitalNomads' producers embedded the clip in a blog post.) From what Santora's saying, no one asked him or the Times for permission to run the endorsement. If so, Dell could be in rather big trouble — and not just with the Times. More » -
-
-
rumormonger
GOP VP's sister works for Federated Media? Nope
(Update: Earlier today, 10 Zen Monkeys reported that Sarah Palin's sister, the one involved in a baroque family scandal, was now working in Sausalito for John Battelle's online ad agency. We've confirmed that this rumor is false. The original post at 10 Zen Monkeys has been unpublished. In the interest of transparency to the 115 of you who read it on RSS, the original text is below.) More » -
jackpot
John Battelle takes $22 million in fuck-you money
Anyone telling you that Federated Media, the online ad network which reps Boing Boing, GigaOm, TechCrunch and other blogs, has raised $50 million from investors is dead wrong. It's true, Oak Investment Partners and others paid $50 million for shares of Federated. But only half of that went to the company, we're told; the rest went to founder John Battelle and other employees. According to our source, Battelle's take was roughly 90 percent of the insider shares sold, or about $22 million. More »
1:00 PM on Wed Apr 30 2008
By Owen Thomas
4,022 views, 4 commentsLatest by moore850: Word on the street is, he'll lose most of that in one incredibly bad hand of poker at a suitcase more »
-
online advertising
Federated Media loses another client to an acquisition
High-Def Digest, a video enthusiast site with more traffic than Boing Boing, has been sold to Internet Brands, a domain-name speculator turned online-advertising network. That's bad news for John Battelle's Federated Media network, which up until now has repped the site; with Sphere's sale to AOL, it's the second acquisition this month to thin Federated's client list. -
jackpot
John Battelle raises $50 million as AOL snatches away his prize
For once, tech publisher John Battelle has timed a bubble just right. With Wired, where he was a founding editor, he was too early; with The Industry Standard, the tech weekly which crashed and burned early in this decade, a bit too late. But with Federated Media, he's proved his dealmaking prowess. He's all but nailed what we hear is $40 million to $50 million in venture capital for the online-ad network , on a $200 million valuation. And this right before AOL bought Sphere, a blog search engine which, by a rough count, serves more than half of the pageviews Battelle sells to advertisers. More »
