Bing certainly isn’t wasting any time in showing off how much it loves Twitter. The search engine has just launched BingTweets, a new site created in tandem with Federated Media that combines Twitter Search results with Bing Search. The hybrid allows users to browse through Bing while they see a stream of real-time results fly by, which could be particularly useful for researching a current event, or perhaps a new movie.

The top of the site features a listing of popular terms, grouped into a general ‘popular now’ category, and then divided by People Places, and Products. You’re also free to search for whatever term you’d like using the box in the upper right hand corner of the screen.

The resulting site could prove useful, but it’s a little cluttered, with a scrolling list of constantly updated Tweets on the left side and your standard Bing search results on the right. This would be fine, were it not for the large ‘trending topics’ section and ’sharing’ sections in the header which should probably be tucked along the side. My biggest gripe, though, is that the Bing search results are in a frame — I’d much rather just have the whole page dedicated to the results, even if I had to sacrifice the nice blue border.

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.

I don’t make any advertising or revenue decisions around here, that’s left to our CEO Heather Harde. But I’m nervous about our ad partner Federated Media, which supplies about a third of our total revenue. They’re going through layoffs (I read this on their blog), and payments from them have dipped substantially in recent months (which isn’t a surprise given market conditions).

We’ve stuck with Federated Media through the years, despite our love/hate relationship with them.

But as advertising dollars become harder to come by, staying with Federated becomes more costly. The biggest issue is that as a market leader among tech blogs, we end up subsidizing others. An example – an advertiser comes to us with, say, a $100,000 spend. They are referred through to Federated, who if they make the sale gets a 40% cut. That cut is fine. But what Federated then does is spread that $100k around to many different blogs. In the end we may only see a small fraction of it spent on TechCrunch. This works in our favor as well when leads come in from other blogs. But given how much higher profile we are than many of the other blogs in the Federated network, a disproportionate share of leads comes in through us.

In effect, we’re subsidizing our competition. As ad dollars become more scarce, the effect of that subsidy is more pronounced.