Couldn’t have said it better myself. Consumer created advertising is swell, but the much bigger idea here is conversational marketing. He even gives me a hat tip toward the end….thanks Jonah!

This week’s BusinessWeek has a short story on FM, it notes our news and does a nice job of describing what FM is all about.
Federated Media doesn’t own the blogs, as do other blogging networks such as Gawker.com, but it keeps 40% of the ad revenue and gives the rest to the site’s owner. “It’s kind of like a music label, except we don’t control their intellectual property and tell them what to sing,” says Battelle.
Bizweek goes on to talk about our revenues. Now, we don’t publicly report these numbers, I have mentioned in other places that we were on an “eight figure revenue run rate” at the end of last year. This translated to a reported figure of $10mm for 2006 in the piece. We were certainly at (well past) that level on an annualized basis by the end of last year, but given that we spent the first half of the year developing our platform and business model, that number as our total for 2006 is high. We’re very pleased with the number we did achieve (and no, we’re not going to post it here!) – and especially with the fact that the majority of all our revenue goes right back out to our authors.
As I’ve posted previously, we now have 18 full time people in sales, compared with an average of about four in 2006. We have four full time folks in author services, and six full time engineers. (Not to mention our great finance and operations crew, who help our authors get paid, among many other things).
We’re looking forward to a great 2007!

Chas gave a great interview here.