Federated Media has been our advertising partner since December 2005. The first checks they sent us allowed TechCrunch to become something more than a guy sitting in a spare bedroom talking about startups to a small audience. Revenue from Federated Media let me hire our first few writers and helped accelerate our growth to the point where we are today.
We’ve had our very vocal dustups with Federated Media over the years, but the fact is that we owe FM a lot, and I’m somewhat sad to announce today that our relationship with them is coming to an end (see Federated’s announcement here). We’ll no longer be working with them on ad sales. We’ve long sold many of our ads directly, and as of now we’ll be taking control of 100% of TechCrunch network ad inventory.
In some ways this is a rite of passage for our still-young blog network. TechCrunch is starting to grow up. We now have six full-time writers on TechCrunch, and our total writing staff across our network is 20 bloggers strong. The TechCrunch Network now reaches more than 5.5 million unique visitors per month and 15 million page views (TechCrunch proper is more than 3 million uniques and 10 million page views / month.) In short, we’re finally getting big enough to matter directly to advertisers and agencies.
I’m personally excited about our new direction. Heather Harde, our CEO, has deep experience in sales and has acquired advertising technology companies in her previous job at News Corp. She’s got a lot of ideas on where online advertising is going. And as our CrunchCam shows, she can get an ad unit on just about anything.
One of the things we’re going to pilot with our expanded go-to-market sales strategy is a self-serve platform hosted by isocket. As the largest independent media property covering technology, TechCrunch is in the fortunate position to have a lot of advertising prospects reach out to us with interest in running on our network. Offering a self-serve platform will enable us to sell smaller units of TechCrunch inventory to be more timely and affordable to marketers and start-ups. For example, we used to sell month-long sponsorships exclusively, and now have weekly, and in some cases, daily buyout opportunities. Inventory on all TechCrunch properties is available, including CrunchGear, MobileCrunch, TechCrunchIT, CrunchBase, TechCrunchEurope, TechCrunchFrance and TechCrunchJapan.
The isocket service is brand new. One of the things that makes working at TechCrunch so much fun is discovering new start-ups and getting to test them out first. TechCrunch is the first pilot client for isocket, a new, yet-to-be-funded startup by John Ramey and Zak Hassanein. The isocket self-serve ad platform sits on top of OpenAds, our ad-serving partner, and will help us offer more transparent and flexible pricing options to advertisers. We’re launching with a modest set of variables, all time-based buyout by the day, week or month. In the coming weeks, we’ll add the ability to purchase CPM-based advertising. We’ll also be launching new targeting channels. For example, marketers who want to reach a mobile audience, can focus a package that includes MobileCrunch, as well as the relevant pages of CrunchGear and TechCrunch and on matching company profiles on CrunchBase.
One of the practices that we will discontinue, at least for the short time, is running ad inventory from multiple third-party networks. Since we haven’t been selling all our own inventory, we need time to get a clean read of the demand for premium advertising on our network. Google AdSense will provide backfill for remnant impressions for the immediate future.
We’d like to acknowledge Federated Media for the contributing role they’ve played to help TechCrunch get to where it is today. Notwithstanding our differences of opinion about the role of conversational marketing, we part friends. Unlike others, we’re not leaving to move to competitive selling networks, we’re just leaving to chart our own course. John, Neil and Chas have contributed to the TechCrunch business in important ways over the last three years. Federated’s commitment to represent aspiring authors is still an important role in the publishing ecosystem.
As part of our kick-off, we’re offering a 20% discount on all advertising purchased directly online through isocket during the month of May (discounted inventory based on availability through 12/31/09.) Our traditional rates resume June 1, so please use this opportunity to test us out and save.
Of course, we welcome advertisers to contact us directly to purchase advertising on either a sponsorship or CPM basis. Please email heather [at] techcrunch [dot] com or visit techcrunch.com/advertise.
Congrats on the growth and success of the TC network!
I am sure there is lots to come and it’s good to realize when a long standing partnership should come to an end to be able to grow beyond potential limitations.
TC is one of my favorite sites, I learn a lot from your and your staff’s writing. I know things will only get better as you expand and grow into new fields such as online video etc… best of luck and congrats on achieving something that many would envy being in the position of.
Jon
http://WoodMarvels.com – Create Unique Memories
Mike & Heather–It’s been a pleasure (most of the time, anyway!). Not that you need luck, but I wish you the best anyway. I hope we’ll find ways to work together down the line.
Thanks Chas. If you want to come work for us we’ll give you a big raise. Or perhaps we should discuss via email.
just kidding John.
sorta.
Thanks for representing us Chas.
Hope to run into you in many lobbies in the near future. Let’s hope that Michael doesn’t have to give me the “Coffee’s for Closers” speech.
“…Unlike others, we’re LOT leaving to move to competitive selling networks, …”
might want to correct this.
fixed. thanks peter
I want to advertise on TC but with the spoils of self serve ad setups, I like the diversity of setting up campaigns that fit the budget of self funding.
I found that the current (old) model was a bit gangster, and have said for some time now if TC starts to open up CPM and buyout ads, this could be very lucrative because I for one would love to reach the demographic here on TC rather than come up with clever keywords on search based advertising.
Now if you guys can get that PressCrunch idea (PRWEB for Techcrunch at $199-$1000 per PR) then you will have a very serious revenue stream. Just sayin.
Congrats to the isocket team on the big win!
This is def. a sign of things to come. It makes a hell of a lot more sense to control your own inventory and reap the rewards of premium ads. Add to that a marketplace for ads that isocket runs and you got a winning combo.
Another web2.0 startup no clear business model. They talk about “commission free” but there is nothing about making money.
i guess they charge a fixed fee somewhere but since they are not disclosing it and are running in beta, i reckon it is free for now.
Reason being – they’ve figured that in order to attract market share from Google Ad Manager and OpenX Hosted, both of which are free, then they have to be free as well which personally, i think is a flawed model.
Why?
OpenX is burning through tonnes of cash at the moment their only source of revenue is premium support for about $1800 and very few of their clients will use it since most are techies.
Google is able to absorb losses on many of their businesss (e.g Youtube) so it is crazy to emulate them
I guess isocket’s plan is to raise awareness then raise VC. good luck.
I won’t be running my ad sales on a startup with no clear disclosure on how they make money and plan to sustain the service.
I think you missed the ‘real’ revenue generating product that OpenX have, which is OpenX Market. It’s an optional but interesting service that allows publishers to offer their inventory for bids on that market, with a floor price set by the publisher. Advertisers will have to bid at least that floor price plus a percentage (I think it’s 15%). The OpenX business model is to enable as many publishers as possible to use the OpenX Ad Server (downloaded or Hosted), so they can also participate in the OpenX Market and thus contribute to OpenX’ revenue stream. Sounds like a smart idea to me. In addition, there’s the Enterprise model for Hosted, which I’ve been told has a substantial number of paying users.
Douglas Adams is the best way to leave any job or partnership
Best of luck with the new ad system.
Firebug tells me the TechCrunch home page is more than 2 MB of files. That’s freaking huge even for a broadband connection.
Many of the HTTP requests on your home page are to external, third-party ad servers. Every one of these slows down the access time to your site, and on many occasions “hangs” the site because the ad server is down or overloaded.
How much is too much? Perhaps you need to take a long hard look at how much *crap* you have on your home page and pare it down a little. Seesmic videos? Really? Does anyone even watch that crap? it’s just a bunch of pasty-faced white computer geeks in love with their webcams, most of who have nothing interesting to say.
The chase for the almighty ad dollar has a diminishing return.
I’ve never had any problems with loading times or “hanging,” mainly because Techcrunch uses the Wordpress supercache plugin and has a great setup with Media Temple.
Hopefully this means we can close the book on FM and their fluff business model once and for all.
I mean really, what is the special value in aggregating a bunch of tech inventory??
Looks like it is all up to exectweets to save FM now.
There’s actually a lot of value in aggregating inventory, particularly to smaller blogs, which is why we got so much value in the beginning. In my opinion FM needs to do things to keep the big names on board, which bring in advertisers that they can fan out to the rest of the blogs, too. As we got bigger we found that we were subsidizing the smaller blog, which is money directly out of our pocket, so we decided to go direct instead. But there is clear value at FM.
Mike you are delusional, you were NOT subsidizing smaller sites. You still don’t get it, do you?
no, we had direct evidence of this. I’m sure it worked in reverse as well, but it is our belief that the costs outweighed the benefits.
I’d love to see your “evidence”.
I agree with you completely, I just dont see “covnersational marketing” as anything more than glorified site repping and when the ’stud’ sites start going their own way that could spell trouble for an offering as verticalized as FM’s
TC is clearly one of FM’s crown jewels and no matter how they spin it, a significant loss to their ability to deliver IO’s and land and retain top publishing partners.
Doesnt $57mm seem a bit extreme for an ad network that isnt bringing any real technology to bear?
It will be interesting to see what happens to the FM’s and other vetical ad networks as the TC’s and Diggs of the world take complete control of their sales and available inventory.
Battelle is a crafty fellow, I am sure he will figure it out.
yes, your right. Digg is killing it on the sales front. how much did they loose last year?
“Conversational Marketing” sounds so 2004. TC and others are really just magazines/newspapers for the 21st century. If Fedmed is still into “blogging” as something different they are falling way behind. These are media sites. 19th century business model wrapped in 21st century packaging. Pretty straight forward, really.
This smells like BS to me. In January you trashed them and said you were going to switch away from them.
http://www.tech...ch-ad-partners/
Now you give them a big wet kiss. Why?
still not sure why Federated exists. Conversational Media is pure nonsense.
Congrats on the success of the TC blogging empire. I anticipate some great things from you guys in the future ( crunchpad, ect.)
http://www.crow...pe-in-wild.html
Just surprised it took this long to move away, I am assuming you felt obligated to stay or had deals that you had to honor.
No reason in the world that you should stay with a broker at the rates you charge for ads.
Good Luck!
Congratulations Michael, you and the crew at TC are doing great things. Love the clever innovations like the TC live webcam and the no-embargo policy. Keep up the great work!
Congratulations! This network, over time has given me more prompt news and objective opinion than I ever could have imagined.
I had been linked to CrunchGear and TechCrunch both many times, before my good friend Ryan (DigitalWebdynamics.com & Averik Solutions) presented it to me as more than just IM spam, and I am now hooked.
So once again, Congratulations! Thank you so much for continuing to remain mostly objective, and sharing even unpopular opinions, I wish you all the best, and hope that one day I can afford some ad space!
Mike,
In your honest opinion, do you think Federated Media is a viable option to use if a new blogger is starting out? Or at this “present time”, would you take a new route if you were just starting out?
What would you do differently today now that you have gone through the ad serving experience?
Most new bloggers won’t be able to have FM broker for them anyway due to minimum traffic requirements.
Hindsight alone as well as sales experience gained over the last few years may not have been enough to say FM wouldn’t have been worth it until now. The delta between in house rev and brokered rev would have to not only be enough to cover what FM could sell for but would also have to cover infrastructure costs of maintaining your own ad serving operation. Somebody to admin OpenX, a sales guy on payroll to sell when maybe that money could be better used for another writer to grow readership (pageviews), etc… Just because you know how to do something doesnt mean there still arent a lot of valid reasons to continue to outsource.
Is this really an announcement about leaving FM or just a less blatant way of promoting your new offering? Whether you advertise in house or not doesn’t matter to me, but using this as a sales tactic is sleazy…
How is this sleazy? Just because TC went from 60% (or whatever it was) in house sales to 100% it doesn’t change that people could always buy direct if they didnt want to go thru FM.
it’s both. you can think it’s sleazy, but we’re a business and there are bills to pay. advertising does that.
I’m fine with ads, that’s the nature of the beast and I’m in the same business of selling adspace for an adnetwork…but using your dumping of FM as an attempt to advertise your own self-service platform is sleazy.
Write two paragraphs about the dumping, then 5 about yourself and the product, 1 reiterating the thankfulness, and then close with a discount…
Just seems lame to me.
congrats but what took you so long lol
I knew sooner or later TC would probably ditch FM. Not because of any falling out, but just because of the economics, too much money being left on the table for a network the size of TC to broker inventory. Mike you even responded to my comment that at the time, it was worth it. Maybe there needs to be Wordpress/comment plugin called “I Told You So” for us navel gazer commenters that put previous post/comments into context when we think we saw something coming down the pipeline that eventually comes true
You know, we were FM’s first client, and this article outrages me. Not once, not once in lo these many years, not once has Federated Media provided us with a single fish. Where the fuck is our fish?
Oh, they’ve earned us money, they’ve netted cash alright, but where is this fish of which you speak? The dollar’s value rises and falls, but fish is something you can count on no matter what the economic climate may be. You can fry it. You can poach it. You can sautee it with a little butter and rosemary (I grow my own).
Where the fuck is our fish, Battelle?
XJ
Hilarious.
I like fish, too, dammit. Enough maybe even to sign up with FM.
you never got actual fish? we did. if fact that’s all we got.
Very good decision Michael! Ad revenues will go up as well as the Ad quality.
Nice on Michael, always good to see something new, it’s been a while.
Only “20 bloggers strong” I thought there were more than that no?
Doesn’t Google Ad Manager perform the same function?
http://www.goog....com/admanager/
No AdManager doesn’t do the same thing as FM, AdManager let’s you manage your inventory, similiar to OpenX (OpenAds), FM would actually sell inventory.
And a lot of publishers don’t want to use AdManager because it could give Google WAYYYYY too much insight into how much money you make off your own ad sales. But that is whole other post entirely.
Ad Manager is fundamentally different from what TC plans to use.
With a self-serve system, TC can setup their own “ad store” and let their advertiser book, pay for and track their campaigns online with minimal adminstrative burden on the TC sales team. AFAIK, with GAM and OpenX Hosted, the publisher will still have to “set everything up”.
See this blog entry for more details: http://www.traf...-trafficspaces/
Providing self-serve advertising makes a lot of sense for publishers. TC’s decision validates the business model on which isocket, Trafficspaces, and perhaps (some others that I’m not aware of) are based.
A clear sign of TC’s maturity as a business. Well done Heather, Mike & team.
Congrats, John and Zak! Great to see your hard work come to fruition.
congrats to TechCrunch, and also to iSocket
props: love iSocket founder John Ramey title: “Chief Awkward Officer”
Also love the title, though it’s misleading. John, you’re gonna have to try a little harder at this whole awkward thing…
Here’s to Isocket and TechCrunch on a long lasting and successful business relationship.
Mike,
Just wanted to let you know – the Isocket ad purchase page where buyers are asked to enter their credit card information is not SSL protected (no https, just http). (For e.g.: I tried to purchase some inventory on your TechCrunch Japan site – http://beta3.is...ac6da0e0275c38b ). Not sure how some tech savvy, securtiy aware folks would feel about using their CC on such a page. I hope Isocket can fix it soon?
SSL is now enabled. Thanks.
Being someone that has a sales background and runs a network of blogs it is always great to see a network go to 100% direct sales.
No one here should bashing federated media as there is no doubt they provide value. After a while though as sites get bigger the economics don’t make sense for the larger sites. They don’t want to give up as much of a cut. Federated media needs to make a certain percentage per ad impression sold so the economics just don’t make sense for them either because odds are they aren’t selling out 100% of their space. They would rather represent a bunch of much smaller blogs and make a higher percentage.
Now the big question is how long does it take techcrunch to start its own tech blog ad network and steal away blogs from federated media.
Congrats to isocket and TC! Good job John and Zak. You two worked diligently like a true pair of skin job Cylons!
Completely agree with @seanpercival
So sad that it should come to this.
We tried to warn you, but oh dear.
You may not share our intellect, which might explain your disrespect… for all the natural wonders that grow around you.
So long and thanks for all the fish.
SPF
isocket looks great, congratulations on the courage to move.
There are no mention of Techcrunch click through rates on isocket, as a potential advertiser i would like to have some indication.
Any ideas anyone?
Wow, Self service is mosdef the new, new.
TC is finally is doing ads4self….100% (datswotsup)
To me, the new question now is …..
Who has the best self serve platform out there?
Is it isocket or trafficspaces or someone else?
I think TC knows who the best platform is. It rhymes with “my rocket”
chill guys.
i don’t think it matters. I’ve just checked the two out and both seem to be good systems.
good startups delivering good software. everything isn’t a battle.
Well done isocket. Well done trafficspaces.
isocket looks good – we just signed up for a beta invite. We’d rather pay a flat fee than a commission. I haven’t used trafficspaces, but a publisher friend of mine said it was pretty broken when they tried it
anonymous troll.
filmrookie.com uses trafficspaces and it works pretty well.
Strange and interesting that the banner ad at the top of this TechCrunch page is for AdReady, which like isocket also does self-service online advertising.
John Cook
From the terms and conditions of ISOCKET it seems like they charge a 10% commission (which is understandable to cover credit card fees, but not quite commission free as advertised on their site):
“Seller agrees to pay isocket a fee equal to 10% of the total notional value of any completed Transaction with a minimum charge of $15.00.”
Why does such an experienced and talented woman like Heather Harde take a job as TC CEO?
Was this the best option for her in the Valley? Many VC firms would be kissing her legs to join their investment team.
Nice on Michael, always good to see something new, it’s been a while.
Only “20 bloggers strong” I thought there were more than that no?