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As a female internet user, I can truthfully state that I do not click on ads. I like being marketed to in a contextually relevant way. This is why Glam has grown to be the #1 women’s destination on the internet…not because we are fooling our users or Publishers.

As for FM, I would be interested to hear Mr. Battelle’s thoughts on BlogAds which would seem to be more of a competitor than Glam in my opinion.

PlayerSearch partners with Fantasy Sports Ventures to serve our sports focused ads, many tech sites partner with John Battelle’s Federated Media and many women’s focused sites partner with Glam Media. It appears that FSV is going to be the…

Why not hire your own sales team? You seem big enough for this.

But ultimately it will be Battelle’s investors that tell him what they would like him to do, and if they are reading TechCrunch, Venturebeat and other related sites, the answer should be fairly clear – own the content.

Sramana

“Battelle: Being a publisher. You’ve got to be a publisher if you want to be in the branded advertising space. You’ve got to act like a publisher and you’ve got to think like a publisher. And that’s not what they’re good at.”

In any case, when FM first launched I wrote Battelle and he said I was doing exactly the kind of thing they were looking for in terms of quality and would eventually get into entertainment blogs.

Over the years I’ve been handed down the chain and can now only contact underlings who simply say I don’t have enough traffic.

Too bad. I don’t know how much longer I can stay in this game and I’m an addict so it’s going to hurt to leave.

On the blog rollup tip in the entertainment and lifestyle world, keep an eye on Rawkus.com and their Uproxx.com project. They’re getting big and they’re going to get much bigger.

Peace!

With a profitable revenue model that clearly splits the market risks associated with advertising rates between FM and its publishers, why take on VC funding?

On #29 above: We don’t do guarantees at FM. Ever. We never pay for inventory that we haven’t already sold. That would break our model. A guarantee says “you go back to writing, and we’ll send you checks and take care of the ads. Ignore the business side of your business until we call you in a year for a renewal.” We succeed by working together with our authors all year long. The result is bigger campaigns, higher CPMs and close partnerships with authors.

What we have done a few times, and will do again in the right circumstances, is offer an advance to an author who’s moving to FM from another source of ad sales — to smooth out the inevitable dip in revenue that comes while our sales effort ramps up — or to even out the monthly cash flow for a successful author who wants to avoid the seasonal highs and lows of the ad business. It’s always a loan, a debt the author owes to FM, and it’s always recouped through ad sales in the following months.

“your note >> Federated Media, by contrast, doesn’t guarantee revenues but is profitable. That may be technically true but they do offer a number of sites substantial up fronts and effectively guarantee a minimum.”

If that’s accurate, that would effectively end any trust we have with FM.