Again, Nick is beating on me and FM without calling us first for comment/clarification. The professional and gentlemanly response is best exemplified by Chas Edwards, who runs sales and market development for us. To quote from his email to Nick:

Nick--

I just read your post on FM's inflated numbers claims, http://valleywag.com/tech/cold-stats/john-battelles-inflated-numbers-218455.php.

We're in frequent dialog with the Comscore gang (and have recently become paying customers!) in an effort to find a better alternative to server logs when we talk about the aggregate reach across our family of sites. But we're still not satisfied with the data. In a chat with Gian and Magid at Comscore earlier this month, even they admitted that accurate measurement of small sites (or even large sites like Digg and Boing Boing, which skew towards tech savvy young men) is a code that hasn't yet been cracked by anyone. I'm sure Comscore will eventually get this figured out, and we're doing all we can to help them.

It will be a great day for all of us when the audit firms get this right -- and capture the reality that upscale, web savvy consumers are gravitating toward Gawker, Gizmodo, Digg, Boing Boing, Dooce and others, instead of the traditional favorites from a decade ago!

Best,

Chas

Chas, for the record, I agree entirely.

Congrats to Heather, Om, and FM. The site is behind a paywall, of course, but here's the link anyway.

Looking for that perfect holiday gadget? FM's authors have got it, in our new Holiday Gadget Guide, which we put together with Best Buy. Check it out!

Release is in extended entry....

Continue reading "The Holiday Gadget Guide" »

On Bambi's blog, we learn Nick Denton, who runs Gawker Media (owner of Valleywag), is going to take over the writing of ValleyWag, so he can focus more on real news. Bambi writes:

"He's looking forward to changing the perception of ValleyWag, as a gossip site about "sex" in the Valley, to a site reaching a broader audience with less interest about trivial scandals and far more interested in the financial impact Silicon Valley has on the world."

Except, of course, the first dribble of a story about "the financial impact Silicon Valley has on the world" is a rather uninformed rumor: (Denton) tells me that he has a juicy scoop about John Battelle's Federated Media advertising network losing a major client. The loss is a "slap in the face" to Battelle, says Denton.

While we'd hate to lose any author, I've said many times that we expect to. While we haven't lost one all year long, we know that fact can't stand. Some might be acquired (As Reddit recently was, though we are still serving their ads for now, and the rumors swirling around Digg's acquisition continue). Some might just want to try a new model or align with a traditional media company (we see that with some partners like Fark, for example, who is working with Maxim on parts of its business , while we continue with other parts on an exclusive basis). Others might have a change of business or editorial focus. And for any number of good reasons we might decide to part ways with an author because we disagree on how to do business. This is to be expected. This is a new kind of business, and we're all learning.

Overall, FM will continue to grow, regardless of who might move on. As I wrote earlier, we have far more great sites that want to work with us than we can support. In the past two months, we've added four new sales people (we're closing in on 15 great salesfolks now, with offices in three cities and a fourth coming soon) and opened 10 new jobs in sales, engineering, and author services. When the time comes to announce more authors, (and many are already signed on - representing far more pageviews than we "lost" from Fark, btw), we'll be ready to support them.

If Nick truly intends to step it up over at Valleywag by improving its financial and business reporting, I am sure he will exercise a long held journalistic skill: understanding the business model of the subjects he's writing about before presuming to judge them, and contacting us for comment before publishing rumor or speculation.

Update: Well, I was wrong about Nick checking his facts and assumptions first. He's posted that Fark is working with Maxim, which is true (and has been for some time), and that he thought my book was "sycophantic", which is not. But the first is based on fact, and the second opinion, so I have no issue with either (you might ask Eric, Larry, Sergey, or nearly every major reviewer whether they think my book was sycophantic, but I digress). He's also right that Fark was a bit hard for us to sell, but in the end, that had to to with any number of reasons, none of which Nick is aware of (or will be, at least from me). Drew and I remain friends, and we are still representing Fark for remnant and other opportunities outside the Maxim relationship.

Nick points out that I was bullish on Fark in the B2 piece, and I remain that way. But this was no "slap in the face." We stared at each other's businesses, and agreed as gentlemen that Maxim was a better partner for CPM ads. And as much as Nick may wish there was some bitchy, juicy, gossip-laden angle to report here, there is not.

Now, is FM an ad network, a label Nick claims I'd disavow? Of course it is, in part. But it's far more than that. And it's this part of FM's business, the part that goes well past being "just an ad network," that I imagine Nick will never take the time to understand. I can't imagine, however, that his ignorance is really anyone's loss. I have always had respect for what he's done at Gawker, and I will continue to (though certainly his personal attacks irritate me, well, personally).

He does his thing, we'll do ours.

Over at GigaOm, Robert Young posits an interesting and clarifying concept: That Google is developing a universal OS for advertising. It's a tempting idea - a unifying metaphor that helps us grok Google's advertising ambitions - but I think the meme needs a perspective from outside the Valley distortion field.

Certainly all of *us* may want a clarifying metaphor that helps us grok Google's relentless push into nearly every advertising market on earth, the real question is whether *advertisers* want it as well. And I think in the end, the answer to that question is most likely a qualified no (qualified because they'll always be happy to push a portion of their budget through automated and efficient channels). But in the end advertisers are not computer programmers, they are marketers, and while it's true that the approach of AdWords and AdSense pushes remarkable efficiencies and opportunities into the practice of marketing, I posit that the practice of marketing is about more than efficiency. It's also about emotion, passion, and conversation. And no matter how hard you try, you can't automate conversations. At least, not until Google (or someone else) pushes computing past the Turing test. And once that happens, what's the point of marketing in the first place?

As Beth Comstock (president of NBC Interactive and at left) said to me on stage at Web 2 earlier this week (I'll paraphrase here): Google is great at pushing efficiencies into the advertising market. But that only serves to highlight and increase the value of truly unique and well produced content (like GigaOm, for example). That kind of content needs to be served by marketing that is part of an ongoing conversation, a conversation that, for now anyway, simply cannot be automated.

It's been a while since we've posted on new staff here at FM, but a number of great folks have joined our ranks. Please welcome:

ERIC AMSDEN

Our finance geek has arrived! Eric comes to us with over 10 years of managing the day-to-day and month end accounting process. The last 2 years were spent as the Accounting Manager at Citadon, Inc. Previous to that, he worked 3 years at Fisher Scientific International managing the corporate division's accounting function.

TAMARA DUMAY & JASON TOSNEY
Great things come in pairs in this East Coast city, and that certainly applies to Account Executives as well. In Federated Media's rapidly expanding New York office, we welcome Tamara Dumay and Jason Tosney. Nothing tricky about their October 31st start date, just a double treat for FM's authors and clients.

Tamara comes to FM after recently producing a magazine in Amman, Jordan focused on Jordan's emerging business and investment opportunities. The production included media solutions sales to government ministers and CEOs of the most influential companies in the country. Her thoughtful approach to business are sure to be a winning combination for all.

Jason joins us from Reed Elsevier Group where he was responsible for generating advertising revenue for some of their Web properties. His natural relationship skills and creativity make him the ideal person to manage our clients and advance innovative marketing campaigns.

Both will manage our strong client relationships in all federations, but Tamara will also focus on Parenting and Travel & Leisure, while Jason will focus on Automotive and Sports.

SAMANTHA KAHN

Samantha Kahn comes to FM from Prism Business Media as the former Online Sales Director for the Entertainment Technology publications, working with the magazines to bring in online advertising revenue, as print dollars move to the web. She has 3.5 years of online sales experience and has worked closely with companies such as Intel, Apple, Dell, HP, and JVC to name a few. Sam has a degree from Columbia University in e-Commerce and Software Development.

JESSICA SULPOR

Jessica spent the past several years working at Google. She worked with a wide range of Fortune 500 clients from Retail, Travel, and most recently Technology B2B. Jessica is excited to be a part of the FM team and enjoys the beautiful views of the bay from FM's offices.

Chas has some interesting and encouraging results in from Symantec's experiments with RSS powered ads on FM sites. From his post:

The data chart plotting Symantec’s RSS ad over the past three weeks looks like a roller coaster. On October 9, for example, news that hackers posted fake information on the Google blog by way of the Host Overflow Application eXception sparked major interest among readers at Digg and Techdirt. This post — the headline of which became the “ad copy” for Symantec’s banner ad for about a day — drove click-through rates about three times the rates on the ad in the first two days of the campaign. No other graphical elements on the ad unit changed.

What I love about this idea is it gets marketers into the conversation of a site in an appropriate way - the creative changes as the sponsors' site changes. Using standard marketing units, the advertiser offers potentially relevant and interesting commentary on topics the audience cares about. If the sponsor has an authentic and high integrity voice, the audience responds. What a great development!

Nice piece on TechCrunch.