federated media

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
3,525 views, 4 comments

Latest by n/a: Word on the street is, he'll lose most of that in one incredibly bad hand of poker at a suitcase gambling stand by Capitola beach. 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.

5:20 PM on Tue Apr 15 2008
By Owen Thomas
371 views, 4 comments

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 »

3:20 PM on Tue Apr 15 2008
By Owen Thomas
640 views, 2 comments

Latest by michaellamb: Ahhhh there's the picture. I've missed it. Just need to get Benioff's mr. olympic pose and I'll feel all's right in the world again. more »

venture capital

Federated Media to raise as much as $50 million in VC round

Federated Media is close to announcing it has won between $40 and $50 million in funding from Oak Investment Partners and others, including Omidyar Network, the investment vehicle of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. The Series C round sets the value of the blog-friendly online-ad network at $200 million. Insiders have said past reports of Federated's fundraising were premature, but we hear the news is for real this time. At this point, we'll believe it when we see the term sheet. Do send us a copy? [PeHUB]

2:16 PM on Mon Apr 14 2008
By Nicholas Carlson
246 views, Comment

rumormonger

Federated Media's rumored $200 million valuation annoys its customers

Matt Marshall's VentureBeat airs a rumor that John Battelle's online blog-ad network, Federated Media, has sold a large stake to Oak Hill Capital. There's logic to it: Oak Hill is a private-equity firm with which his bankers, GCA Savvian, has previously done business. Battelle, left, was on a conference call when I tried to reach him, but in the past he's offered no comment on investment rumors. Another source dashes cold water on the notion that a deal's been done. I'd be the first to tell you not all rumors pan out. What I find more interesting about the report is this line: More »

4:20 PM on Thu Apr 3 2008
By Owen Thomas
733 views, 1 comment

Latest by n/a: No one really respects FM because they don't do a great job of selling their inventory and they don't have their own ad server so they're limited as to what they can actually do. It's a rep firm --- plain more »

rumormonger

Is John Battelle selling a piece of Federated Media?

VentureBeat reports that online ad network Federated Media is close to raising a $30 million round of financing, at a valuation of $200 million. The deal is not as advanced as VentureBeat suggests, we hear. But let's assume a large investor is seriously weighing a term sheet. Awesomely tan tech-reporter-turned-salesman John Battelle must be torn. More »

5:40 PM on Wed Mar 19 2008
By Owen Thomas
536 views, 2 comments

deals

John Battelle turns down $100 million offer for Federated Media

When word leaked that John Battelle had hired San Francisco investment bank Savvian to "manage investor interest" in Federated Media, his online-ad network, the move raised a question: How interested were investors? $100 million interested, reports Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch. That's the offer Battelle got, and turned down, from one unnamed investor. Schonfeld also points out this curiosity: At Battelle's last venture, the Industry Standard, the entrepreneur was the one pushing to sell out, not wait for a better offer.

2:49 PM on Thu Jan 24 2008
By Owen Thomas
564 views, 5 comments

Latest by n/a: I bet to disagree to the comments. Google is nothing but ad network. FM has some good clients in their kitty and if they stay there its worth a scalable investment. Cant say the worth unless we can figure out the more »

breaking

Federated Media hires a banker -- is John Battelle's company up for sale?

John Battelle's online-ad rep firm, Federated Media, has hired a small investment bank, Savvian LLC, to "manage investor interest," according to a source close to the company. What does that mean? Hopefully Battelle wasn't giving interested investors his customary greeting, shown here. FM sells advertising and performs other services for blogs in specific subject areas. It's especially strong in tech, representing TechCrunch, GigaOm, and VentureBeat, among others. Online ad networks are fashionable among investors right now, so it's possible Federated could be entertaining buyout offers. But Battelle's choice of a banker is curious: Savvian is known for helping companies in dire straits. It's also known for getting smaller media companies sold to larger ones — such as BeliefNet, recently purchased by News Corp. with Savvian's help.

1:13 PM on Wed Jan 23 2008
By Owen Thomas
632 views, 7 comments

Latest by andyfox1979: federated should start acquiring growing blogs instead of just repping them, if they have the capital to do so. Otherwise all they have is some contracts that will expire sooner or later. This puts the publishers in a position of power: more »

forecasts

John Battelle's secret to making year-end predictions

Along with gifts, wassailing, and bah humbugs, the holidays bring an onslaught of predictions for the new year that mostly aren't worth reading. But if you are interested, egoblogger Robert Scoble sits down with the Supremely Tanned One, Federated Media chairman John Battelle, to ask how he manages to make predictions that are remarkably accurate. The secret, replies Battelle to the fawning Scoble, after first congratulating himself for his success rate, is: "A lot of these are not that difficult to predict." It doesn't take the ambiguities of a Nostradamus quatrain to predict that Microsoft would buy its way into advertising, Yahoo would struggle, blogs would get better, and people would call Web 2.0 a bubble. So if you are preparing your own predictions for 2008 and want to achieve a high success rate, don't predict — just state the obvious.

7:00 AM on Mon Dec 24 2007
By Tim Faulkner
835 views, 4 comments

Latest by BobDope: Scoble's on some Chris Farley: Remember the time you predicted Apple would release a new product? That was AWESOME! more »

hulu

A gift for our dear readers: 10,000 Hulu Invites

I saw a theme this morning as I perused the various other tech sites: Hulu invites! Hulu, the video-streaming partnership between News Corp. and NBC, is throwing open its doors to many early adopters by offering up thousands of invites on several tech sites. If you haven't gotten a chance to play around with Hulu and want to see just what the hell Paul Boutin is complaining about, here's your chance. GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, TechCrunch, and Mashable are giving away 2,500 invites each. All, we note, are clients of Federated Media, John Battelle's online-ad network. Coincidence, conspiracy, or just part of a future Hulu advertising campaign?

9:20 AM on Thu Dec 20 2007
By Jordan Golson
1,134 views, 3 comments

Latest by insertcoin: Mashable is offering the same thing... however, if you miss this opportunity you can always checkout [hellohulu.com] and watch Hulu Videos without an invite. more »

jakobandjulia.com

Relive the disgusted voyeurism of Jakob and Julia with the new John and Jen

Another startup boy and his girlfriend have started a Tumblr blog to overchronicle their relationship. Shortly after Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick and TV personality Julia Allison broke up and ended their blog Jakob and Julia, John Shankman (an employee of the Federated Media online ad agency) started the semi-anonymous JohnandJen.net. More »

5:37 PM on Thu Dec 13 2007
By Nick Douglas
1,965 views, 11 comments

lazy valleywag

John Battelle's million-dollar ad deal

WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — At a panel discussion about making money in online video, Federated Media VP of sales Chas Edwards said he'd pulled checks "from a million dollars down to $10,000" for video ads on Federated's network, which includes the popular shows Diggnation and Ask a Ninja. The burning question: Who paid a million bucks to Federated, run by Web 2.0 conference co-chief John Battelle, and for what? We were unable to tackle any of Federated's execs at the jam-packed conference Wednesday. Somebody get Edwards or jbat to spill the details, and send it to us. Otherwise we'll wonder if Edwards wasn't actually referring to Microsoft's non-video advertorial deal for which Federated bloggers wrote ad copy. Why? Because Edwards also said the biggest dollars come from selling "host endorsements" rather than separate advertiser-produced spots.

5:03 AM on Fri Oct 19 2007
By Paul Boutin
290 views, 2 comments

Latest by ScalaWag: Plus 'pulled checks' could mean some bulk sale into the future, not any particular ad campaign. Way to inflate revenues before selling out. Kind of if you buy lots of inventory upfront we'll give you a huge discount. more »

web 2.0 summit

John Battelle wants to hike his rates

WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — Is preternaturally tan conference organizer John Battelle, who runs online-ad network Federated Media, here to interview top industry executives — or cut some deals of his own? "There's this idea that you can sprinkle some pixie dust on all this inventory and make more money," he observes, speaking of the mass of Web ads sold at bargain-basement rates. AOL's Curt Viebranz says that ads sold on Tacoda — the startup he just sold to AOL for a reported $275 million — sell at a $4 cost per thousand viewers. When he hears that figure, Battelle raises his eyebrows and asked Viebranz to talk to him after the panel.

4:32 PM on Thu Oct 18 2007
By Owen Thomas
410 views, 1 comment

Latest by eze: owen, could you please link the phrase "preternaturally tan," above, to this earlier valleywag piece? [valleywag.com] maybe i'm a george hamilton fan. more »

online advertising

The great blog rollup

At times, there's nothing more amusing than watching a blogger in the middle of a meltdown. Barry Ritholz, the CEO of stock-research firm Fusion IQ, has apparently been seized by panic over an interesting, but unthreatening, development: Big media companies getting into the business of selling ads for blogs. They've already built up an expensive ad sales force, and often find it difficult to grow traffic on their websites faster than their salespeople can sell it. A natural solution: Approach blogs covering similar topics and offer to sell ads on their sites, sharing the revenue. The Washington Post was one of the first to do so, and now, apparently, Reuters is getting into the game. The part that has Ritholz alarmed, though, is a requirement that the blogs "assign" their traffic to the larger company for purposes of getting counted by Nielsen/NetRatings and ComScore Media Metrix, the two largest Web-traffic research firms. Why does Ritholz find this so alarming — and why is he utterly wrong? More »

10:49 AM on Mon Oct 8 2007
By Owen Thomas
503 views, 1 comment

Latest by ritholtz: I understand that many people look at this as just a standard measuring approach - but I don't buy that. It is too easy to actually measure precisely how many ads are served or clicked on. Why, then, the aggregation/assignment approach, more »

party report

Conversational Marketing Summit unofficial afterparty

I stopped by the House of Shields for the "unofficial afterparty" of this week's Federated Media Conversational Marketing Summit and was greeted by a crowd of FM employees and Web 2.0 regulars. You could tell the crowd apart pretty easily — the FM employees wore suitjackets and had the ad-salesman glow to them, the regulars all answered "no" when asked if they attended the conference. A few FM employees indulged my request to pose for a picture doing the John Battelle salute, including Director of Author Services Bill Brazell, pictured above. (Fun fact: he and I graduated from the same high school!) So what is "Conversational Marketing" anyway? New advertising paradigm? Or just a way to keep FM boss Batelle in Mystic Tan? At one point, social media gadfly Chris Heuer and I talked about whether the term itself has a definition beyond "bullshit." He seems to think it does, I'm still undecided. The whole idea has the taint of undisclosed advertorial to me, especially after last June's "people-ready" mini-scandal and its aftermath. After the jump, check out the gallery for more tech marketing people than you can handle. More »

6:26 PM on Wed Sep 12 2007
By Megan McCarthy
799 views, 1 comment

Latest by bobdmac: "Conversational marketing" is talking to Robert Scoble so he mentions you in his bog. more »

to do

Coming up on the Valleywag calendar

Friday: Anyone heading to Facebook board member Peter Thiel's posh VIP gathering Friday night? Let us know how it goes.
Saturday: The Singularity Summit takes place at the Palace of Fine Arts' theater. Be there to hear about the wonderful world of machine learning and how to shape artificial intelligence to avoid a future full of robot attacks. [Singularity Institute]
Tuesday: Federated Media's Conversational Marketing Summit is Tuesday and Wednesday at the Presidio. [Federated Media]

Wednesday: Stirr is back with another "Founders' Hacks" event, this time up in the city. Schlep your way to Mighty in Potrero Hill to hear founders from Lookery, Vadver, and OoogaLabs try and say their companies names without looking foolish. [Eventbrite]
Don Clark of the Wall Street Journal heads up an evening of rock music at the Rockit Room, as a fundraiser for the Girls for a Change charity. [Upcoming]

Valleywag Calendar

5:53 PM on Fri Sep 7 2007
By Megan McCarthy
219 views, Comment

Valleywag

Kinderplex crisis reveals Google founder's fumbling and fibbing

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