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.

Federated Media (FM), the advertisement brokerage arm for many high-end clients has hired Savvian, an investment bank to potentially seek additional investors or to be responsible for incoming offers. There were speculations that Federated Media may be looking for an acquisition, but the company said specifically that the they are not interested in selling. FM’s priority is to focus on growth.

Federated Media publishing partners include GigaOM, TechDirt, BoingBoing, Digg, VentureBeat, and Mashable [full list here]. Federated Media is run by John Battelle, one of the original founders of Wired magazine and also author of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.

In total, Federated Media raised over $4.5 million from investors such as JP Morgan, The New York Times, and Omidyar Network. Individual investors include Mitchell Kapor, Tim O’Reilly, Mike Homer, and Andrew Anker.

Some of the transactions that Savvian was involved in includes Dell’s acquisition of Everdream, Motricity’s acquisition of Infospace, News Corp.’s acquisition of Beliefnet, and RevolutionHealth’s acquisition of HealthTalk.

[Information Source: paidContent]