John Battelle’s “author-driven” blog network Federated Media is making a million dollars per month, according to a story in Marketwatch.
FM boasts 100 sites, so that’s about $10,000 on average per site. It’s not a large number for an ad network but for a blog network, it’s pretty good in the sense that few blogs make $10,000 per month. Of course, FM has a nice list of sites, many of which are not really blogs at all. Also, some of those sites could pull in considerable revenues.
The article does not clarify if Battelle is clearing a million a month or booking a million per month, which would be subject to a 25-75% share with the publishers. At a flat 50%, that means his company is raking in about $500,000 per month, which is not bad at all.
[UPDATED: Consistent with the nature of most ad rep relationship, Mr. Battelle adds “we give the majority [of revenues] to the authors,” adding that “total bookings are more” than the $1M figure Marketwatch mentions. Indeed, a sign of the times, and times are good.]
For what it’s worth, Battelle might invariably become a victim of his own success and some sites ask for more money (or get offers from competing blog networks). The biggest risk in ad repping is the threat of someone else making more lofty promises. The second biggest problem is under-delivering. For our previous, more lengthy analysis of ad repping, click here.
Disclosure: HipMojo is the IT blog in a network called BloggerMojo.com, which contains 17 blogs. BloggerMojo.com is a unit of Mojo Supreme, a privately held, contextually driven digital media, technology and services company.
January 18th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
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