For years Automattic’s WordPress.com has allowed bloggers to make money with ads. The best option thus far has been Google AdSense. Now WordPress is saying “you deserve better than AdSense.” Now Automattic has launched a new service called WordAds. There are over 50,000 WordPress-powered blogs launching every day. These blogs will soon be able to place ads on their websites through Automattic’s partnership with Federated Media. [WordPress Blog]

Federated Media Publishing is a media and publishing company that connects brand marketers with content publishers. Federated Media was founded by John Battelle, one of the original founders of Wired Magazine. Federated Media has acquired Lijit Networks, an online advertising provider and analytics company.

Online advertising firm Federated Media has acquired its first full start-up called BigTent. BigTent is a company that helps parents build custom social networks. Through their publishing partners, Federated Media reaches about 8 million parents. “I care less about platform, if you will, and I care more about the influence of the authors and the products as well as the audiences that they serve,” stated Federated Media president and COO Deanna Brown. BigTent previously raised funding from Menlo Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures. [VentureBeat]

Roger Penske’s son Jay Penske is a Michigan-born entrepreneur that went to high school at St. Mary’s Preparatory and went to Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently the Chairman and CEO of Mail.com Media Corp (MMC), a digital media and publishing company. Mail.com owns websites such as Mail.com, Deadline.com, OnCars.com, MovieLine.com, MailTimes, Fan.com, and HollywoodLife.com. Jay also founded a company that developed the firefly mobile phone for kids. Mail.com raised $35 million from Quadrangle Group in September 2008.

Chas Edwards was the Chief Revenue Officer at Federated Media up until now.  He has quit to become the Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer at social bookmarking website Digg.com.  Digg hired Thomas Shin from Yahoo! recently and he will be reporting directly to Edwards.

Mike Maser, the current Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer at Digg will become the Chief Strategy Officer.  He will control the marketing, community management, and business development at Digg.

Federated Media founder John Battelle plans to start looking for Edwards’ replacement.  This past January, Federated Media cut their staff and decided to start focusing on conversational marketing.  Federated Media and Microsoft also recently started a project together called ExecTweets which I thought was a terrible idea.

Two of Federated Media’s biggest publisher partners GigaOM and TechCrunch recently cancelled their agreements.  GigaOM decided to sign with a different ad partner and TechCrunch decided to sell ads directly themselves.  Digg themselves left in 2007 after a partnership with Microsoft.

Edwards joins Digg at a time where the company has decided to find additional revenue streams.  Digg is also focusing on directly sales and is pushing for profitability.  Digg made about $8.5 million in revenue in 2008 and they will probably need to make double that amount in order to become profitable.

[via TechCrunch]

Microsoft, Federated Media, and Twitter have partnered on a website that I think is a pretty lame concept here.  The concept is that Twitter aggregates tweets from business executives and puts it on the homepage of this website.  The service is called ExecTweets.  Some of the technology executives who they track include Sam Decker, Craig Newmark, Jeffrey Hayzlett, Padmasree Warrior, etc.

Twitter gave the site their blessing and accepted the site to use their logo.  There is a revenue sharing partnership between Federated Media and Twitter for this website.

Personally I think that this service is a terrible idea.  This experience takes away from the whole Twitter environment.  What makes Twitter so great is that you can choose to follow people that have similar interests as you or is the exact opposite as you.  Regardless you customize your experiences but in the ExecTweet world, everything is preset.

That is the same reason why I did not like AllTop initially.  It is just a bunch of RSS feeds that was preset based on what Guy Kawasaki thinks should belong there.  The user cannot customize anything.  Ask anyone at the big 3 search engine companies and they can tell you that everyone wants their homepage customizable.

Some people are claiming that through this website “Twitter has found a business model.”  Clearly a revenue sharing agreement isn’t a revenue model because they are not utilizing their entire user base.  They’re just allowing themselves to receive money from a website that anyone could recreate and not share money with them.  Want an example of a site that aggregates users from Twitter and doesn’t give the company royalties?  Kevin Roses’ WeFollow.com.

Federated Media has built their reputation for providing blogs and other content websites with high CPM display advertisements.  However they have lost several partners through acquisitions or by others leaving voluntarily.  Ars Technica was with FM before they got bought out by Wired.  GigaOm switched from FM to IDG.  And Microsoft even poached an advertising deal with Digg.

In June 2007, Federated Media took some heat for making bloggers recite a Microsoft slogan in several conversational campaigns.  Valleywag exploited the bloggers for doing this.  Founder of Federated Media John Battelle wrote that he wished all of the blog authors disclosed that they had a relationship with the advertisers.  TechCrunch author Michael Arrington wrote that FM Publishing threw bloggers under the bus for writing that statement.

Ever since those times, the U.S. economy has been in a struggling economic state which led FM Publishing to question their current marketing practices.  Basically FM Publishing wants to displaying more engaging advertisements rather than just display ads.  Even though they are cutting some staff, FM Publishing will be expanding the Strategic Programs and Major Accounts divisions.

[via FM Blog]

Federated Media is an advertising broker partner for many top tech tier sites.  They power the advertising for TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider, Mashable, You’re the man now dog, AppleInsider, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, TechDirt, etc.  To date, Federated Media has raised $57.5 million.

Federated Media (FM) has lost a number of partners to acquisitions and poaching.  Digg was a partner of FM before Microsoft signed a deal with them.  Ars Technica was a partner of FM before Condé Nast bought them out.  Another Federated ad partner, Sphere was picked up by AOL.

Now GigaOm will be stepping down from FM to sign with IDG Group.  IDG’s Network includes CIO, Computerworld, JavaWorld, Linuxworld, Macworld, PC World, etc.

In related news, Federated Media is also slashing advertising rates in order to adapt to rough economic advertising conditions.  TechCrunch’s CPM has been dropped from $36 to $23.40.  Silicon Alley Insider’s weekly square button ads have been dropped from $630 to $409.50.