Federated Media Publishing, the advertising brokerage company founded by John Batelle is rumored to be raising another amount of funding.  The second round of funding is expected to be between $20-$30 million according to Stefanie Olsen, an editor at CNET.  The first round of funding was $4.5 million by JPMorgan Partners, the Omidyar Network, and The New York Times.  The Omidyar Network was founded by Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay.

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.

Amazon.com announced today that they are investing in Bill Me Later, Inc. Not only that, but Amazon is also signing a agreement with the online billing company as well. eBay and PayPal has thus far proved the synergy of combining an online retailer with an online billing payment company. Over 90% of all eBay auctions are paid via PayPal so it made sense for eBay to buy them for $1.5 billion.

“Bill Me Later has developed a very customer-centric method to make online shopping even easier,” stated Matt Swann, VP of payments at Amazon.com. “We are pleased to make the convenience of Bill Me Later available to our tens of millions of Amazon customers [source: Amazon.com press release].”

The investment terms were not disclosed, but the company has $200 million in funding capital according to TechCrunch. Bill Me Later investors include Chase Paymentech, Azure Capital Partners, First Data Corp, Crosspoint Venture Partners, GRP Partners, CIT Group Inc., Citigroup Corporate and Investment Banking, Citigroup, Equifax, T. Rowe Price, and Legg Mason Inc.

“Amazon.com and Bill Me Later share the same commitment to making shopping easy for consumers,” stated Gary Marino, the CEO of Bill Me Later. “Just as Amazon invented a new and better way for people to shop online, Bill Me Later has created a new and better way for people to pay for purchases online.”

Before joining Bill Me Later, Marino was an EVP, Chief Credit Officer, and Chief Marketing Officer of consumer lending at First USA/Bank One.

“We have taken traditional consumer research to the next level. For the first time ever marketers can understand all aspects of consumer activity, including critical links between online and offline behavior,” stated Gian Fulgoni, Co-Founder of comScore.  comScore is an Internet information provider that monitors consumer behaviors and trends online.  comScore has a plethora of lucrative clients such as Verizon, T-Mobile, Viacom, AOL, iVillage, CareerBuilder, Microsoft, and Yahoo!.  All of these clients benefit from the human-computer interactions monitored by comScore.  It will be comScore, Inc. will be listed under NASDAQ: SCOR.

comScore was created in 1999 and had acquired assets from NetRatings during the dot-com bust.  About 12% of comScore’s 2006 $66 million in sales came from Microsoft.  The company is often times cited in the press for its statistical information.  In a recent Bloomberg article, comScore statistics were used for reporting how many more visitors were attracted to YouTube this year compared to last.  YouTube had 133.5 million visitors this past January and 9.5 million the January before that.  comScore also reported that 94.8 million visitors visited the website this past January and 38.9 million the year before.

A number of financial companies have stake in comScore.  Investors include JPMorgan Partners, Accel Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, Lehman Brothers, Adams Street Partners, Topspin Partners, Flatiron Partners, vSpring Capital, Devine InterVentures, and Rembrandt Venture Partners.  The number of shares expected to release during the IPO is not yet known.