The website employs three writers. Geller never went to college — he dropped out of Greenwich High School in Greenwich, Connecticut and started blogging for Engadget at age 17. He started BGR in 2006. BoyGeniusReport makes money through a partnership with Federated Media, but Penske will be replacing them with another ad provider. [AllThingsD]

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]

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.

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 (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.

The funding source originates from a blog post written by Eric Eldon on VentureBeat. Savvian, the investment banking firm that Battelle acknowledge hiring supposedly helped with brokering the deal. FM has not confirmed the deal though.

In terms of revenue, FM supposedly earned $20-$23 million over the last year and is expected to earn $60 million this year. Federated Media brokers ads for Alarm:CLock, AltSearchEngines, Ars Technica, BoingBoing, GigaOm, Guy Kawasaki’s personal blog, LiveSide, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Sphere, TechCrunch, Techdirt, VentureBeat, and Wikia.

Federated Media also recently employed GCA Savvian Advisors to help them work investment queries.  There was a rumor floating that Federated Media was offered $100 million for a buyout, but turned it down.  Ad networks around the world are raising funds and are being acquired.  Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion and Microsoft acquired aQuantive for $6 billion.  Yahoo! and AOL have also picked up a couple of advertising companies as well.

Federated Media has been generating large sums of advertising revenue and has even paid some of their clients $1 million.  Federated Media’s network of publishers include TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOM, Digg, and BoingBoing.