Yesterday Techmeme announced a riff on sponsorships, asking that its sponsors run their feeds inside ad units on Techmeme. A great idea, one we've been working on at FM as well. In fact, the first of these is already running, with Symantec, on TechDirt and Digg. I'm very pleased to see this kind of thinking at work in the blogosphere! For more, see Chas's post on the subject.

Of BusinessWeek' recent list of the 12 best blogs, four were FM partners. Way to go TechCrunch, Paul Kedrosky, Internet Outsider, and Boing Boing!

Joel Johnson, late of Gawker, has launched Dethroner, and is working with FM. Good luck Joel!

FM's had quite a summer, building out a new Automobile federation, and adding a great group of quality new sites in our existing federations. Below is a release that sums it all up.

But I want to call out the statement at the bottom of the release, as I think it bears discussion. The release states:

With the addition of these quality sites, FM will slow the pace of new Author recruitment in the coming months. The company has been fortunate enough to attract the interest of hundreds of web publishers, but, given the personal attention FM’s model delivers to each site, FM will focus on servicing existing Authors and evaluating prospective Authors with which it has already begun discussions.

In short, recent attention to FM, as I noted earlier, has meant hundreds of folks have contacted us in the past month or so, all with the goal of supporting their independent media site. We're honored by the chance to help them, but not at the expense of the folks we're already working with. I've been around this block a few times, and jumping at every opportunity is a fine way to lose one's footing.

As I posted on our internal Author blog:

It's clear we're hitting something of an inflection point in the business, and before we can grow our author base any more, we need to make sure we have the right processes in place to support that growth.

So while we have a number of great authors already "in the pipeline" who will be coming onboard in the next month or so, we've decided to hold off on courting new authors until we review how we bring folks on, what resources we need to marshall to keep you all happy, and, frankly, to let the current new crop of authors get fully integrated into our platform. Between surveys, ad codes, remnant programs, and the host of questions that come from joining FM, it will take time for the new folks to get truly settled in. Before we add more, we want to make sure you all are happy to begin with.

FM will be growing its author base relatively slowly over the next month or so, while we focus on taking care of those who are already with us. I'm pleased to report that last week we had our biggest week in sales ever, matching in one week what we did in one month just a few months ago. While I'm sure we'll have news on new partnerships soon, it's our job to make sure that our current partners are happy first. That's why we've decided to hit pause, and refresh.

WIth that in mind, I'm pleased to present the summary of a great summer's worth of work:

----------------------

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Federated Media Publishing Strengthens Business & Marketing, Adds Auto Federation

Welcomes Freakonomics, Make, Sphere, and Leftlane News, among many others

Sausalito, CA – September 18, 2006 – Federated Media Publishing (FM), the fast-growing network of author-driven websites including Digg, Boing Boing and Dooce, has grown to represent more than 85 properties and has formed a new Federation in the Auto category. In recent months, FM has welcomed dozens of talented authors running sites including the Freakonomics blog, Guy Kawasaki's Signum Sine Tinnitu, Henry Blodget’s Internet Outsider, the website companion to O'Reilly Publishing's Make Magazine, and blog search engine Sphere.

The latest additions strengthen the company’s existing Federations and establish a new one: Automotive. Initial sites in this burgeoning Federation include Leftlane News, AutoSpies, The Truth About Cars, Boompa, TopSpeed and Serious Wheels. With the founding of the Automotive Federation, FM has brought together more than 9 million monthly pageviews on these auto enthusiast sites.

Leftlane News is a leading source for automotive industry and vehicle news, while AutoSpies is the insider's guide to the world's finest automobiles. The Truth About Cars features stylish, no-holds-barred writing, and TopSpeed provides a space for car enthusiasts to read, learn and argue. Boompa is a social network and wiki for vehicle enthusiasts. Meanwhile, Serious Wheels has emerged as the premier online destination for high-quality collector car images.

Marketers and readers seeking witty, well-written dispatches on family life can turn to the latest additions to FM’s Parenting federation: Finslippy, Laid-Off Dad and Dad Gone Mad. These join Heather Armstrong's Dooce.com, which generates 2.4 million pageviews per month, and Danielle Friedland's Celebrity Baby Blog with more than 2.7 million monthly pageviews.

FM is pleased to add Hugh MacLeod's popular cartoon site, Gaping Void, and Dethroner, the new blog by former Gawker Media author Joel Johnson, to its Media & Entertainment Federation. Make, Cartoon Brew, Zoom In Online, TransBuddha, Mojizu and Hawaiirama also bolster the company's offerings in this category.

FM’s Business & Marketing Federation benefit from the additions of Freakonomics blog authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, whose book of the same name has been a New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller for well over a year. FM also welcomes Guy Kawasaki's Signum Sine Tinnitu, Dragon Head Almost Destroyed Me and Five Blogs Before Lunch, the winner of a Webby award for "Best Business Blog".

FM’s already formidable Technology and Tech Culture Federation is filled out by Henry Blodget’s Internet Outsider, Uncrate, Gear Live, LiveSide, Real World Technology and Mad Professor, which is authored by Boing Boing author Mark Frauenfelder. Technorati ranks Boing Boing, one of the first sites to join FM, as the most influential blog in the English language.

The advanced blog search engine Sphere rounds out FM's Momentum Federation, where it joins Digg, Fark, Reddit, Tailrank, Metafilter, and Newsvine.

With the addition of these quality sites, FM will slow the pace of new Author recruitment in the coming months. The company has been fortunate enough to attract the interest of hundreds of web publishers, but, given the personal attention FM’s model delivers to each site, FM will focus on servicing existing Authors and evaluating prospective Authors with which it has already begun discussions.

The complete list of sites recently added to the FM network, including URLs, is:

* Left Lane News - http://leftlanenews.com/
* Dad Gone Mad - http://www.dadgonemad.com
* Dethroner - http://www.dethroner.com (still in private beta)
* Internet Outsider - http://www.internetoutsider.com
* AutoSpies - http://www.autospies.com
* Dragon Head Almost Destroyed Me - http://www.dhadm.com
* TransBuddha - http://www.transbuddha.com
* Hawaiirama - http://www.hawaiirama.com
* Five Blogs Before Lunch - http://daveibsen.typepad.com
* Freakonomics - http://www.freakonomics.com/blog
* Gaping Void - http://gapingvoid.com
* Real World Technology - http://realworldtech.com
* Top Speed - http://topspeed.com
* The Truth About Cars - http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com
* Sphere - http://sphere.com/
* Make - http://www.makezine.com/
* Live Side - http://www.liveside.net/
* Serious Wheels - http://www.seriouswheels.com
* Uncrate - http://www.uncrate.com/
* Guy Kawasaki's Signum Sine Tinnitu - http://blog.guykawasaki.com/
* Gear Live - http://www.gearlive.com/
* Mojizu - http://www.mojizu.com
* Zoom In Online - http://www.zoom-in.com

About Federated Media Publishing (FM)

At FM, we believe great voices attract great audiences. We're in the business of supporting those voices by connecting them to great marketers, as well as providing a suite of services that let authors focus on what they do best: make compelling media. In so doing, we are creating federations of respected voices that prosper on their own terms. Current federations include Technology, Automotive, Business & Marketing, Media & Entertainment, Momentum, and Parenting.

More information can be found at:

http://federatedmedia.net/

Contact: Jennifer Charette
Phone: (415) 332-6955 ext. 113

One of the maxims of running a business is as it starts to get traction, folks will notice, and when they notice, they will start to question it. That's happening more and more here at FM, and it's happening to one of our partners, Digg.com, as well. Today, both of us were questioned - via Digg, no less. It's worth taking a look at.

A Digg user linked to a blogger who questioned why Digg would work with us, as opposed to having their own sales force. The Digg posting, which can be found here, started quite a conversation on Digg itself.

The author of the post which got Dugg said:

Most online advertising is still sold by teams of real people employing antiquated technologies such as the telephone, in-person pitch and liquid lunch. Federated Media have chosen to follow the Google model, offering a self-service approach where advertisers must sign up and deploy advertising campaigns via a series of interconnected web pages. Hardly the exciting, kick-back enhanced world of advertising the market knows and loves.

Had the poster done his homework, he'd realize FM has a large (12 and growing) direct salesforce, which is very focused on selling Digg, as well as all of our other sites. He'd also realize that we represent a limited number of sites (around 85 today) and are very much human driven, as opposed to alogorithmically driven. Sure, we have a self service platform, but that's just a (small) portion of our business. I was getting ready to respond in this fashion (on the Digg thread) and correct the record, but I didn't have to - as Jay Adelson, the CEO of Digg, jumped in and did a better job than I could have done. (Chas, our VP or Sales, also has a nice write up here.)

As we build FM, I've realized that our period of relative obscurity is drawing to a close. We are under increasing scrutiny, and should be, given the high profile sites we now represent. Besides Digg, we are also working with Dooce, Boing Boing, GigaOm, Newsvine, TechCrunch, TechDirt, AutoSpies, Freakonomics, Make, and nearly 80 other sites. The authors behind those sites have high expectations of us, and we are totally focused on meeting them.

Perhaps the most common criticism of the FM model is that once a site gets to some scale - a figure of one or two million pageviews a month is often cited - that site should leave FM and hire its own salesforce. It sounds smart, but in fact it doesn't consider any number of factors which go into the reality of running a sales-driven media business. Sure, if you want to run a traditional media business - where 10-15% of the costs are in content creation, and 85-90% of the costs are in stuff that have nothing to do with content - well, go right ahead. But be prepared to be surprised when your margins are consistently in the red. Have you hired a finance person? A traffic person? A business development chief? How about collections? IT? Operations? I'm guessing that many sites prefer to focus on what they do best, and let us focus on the stuff we do best. Not to mention, the advertisers out there have very little time to have 50 meetings with 50 sales folks from 50 different sites, each with 1-2 million pageviews. That model does not scale. (And, by the way, good luck hiring those 50 sales people. They are nearly as scarce as good developers these days, and just as expensive.)

In the end, the economics are far better if you, well, federate. FM's model is based on the idea that content creators should get 60% of the dollars, not 10-15%. Sounds a lot better, doesn't it? Plus, advertisers get access to high quality sites at scale. So far, GM, Sony, Apple, Intel, Audi, BMW, Home Depot, Hitachi, and about 250 others have shown they agree by coming on board with FM sites. Yes, we are not selling out most of our sites. And yes, we'd sure like to. But launching media businesses take time, patience, and commitment. All of our partners understand that. Why? Because they're in the media business too.

I'll be posting more on these topics in the coming days - it's time to talk more openly about what we're doing. Now that folks are asking interesting questions, it's time to communicate our model more explicitly to the world.

WebWorkerDaily will track the world of working the way, well, most of us work these days. Congrats, Om.