John Battelle, best know as a founder of Wired Magazine, is set to launch a new blog advertising network that will compete directly against Henry Copelands Blog Ads network.
Details of the network were provided in a speech blogged by Jason Calacanis, and further details have since been revealed.
The network, Federated Media, which is also strangely the same name as an Indiana Radio Network is set to launch with between 10 and 20 technology-related blogs, including uber blog Boing Boing, as well as Battelle’s own SearchBlog.
Battelle told Clickz News that “The theory is that blogs are difficult to buy, because the people running them don’t know how to sell…what FM will hope to do is bring together an ecology of sites that taken together provides scale to an advertiser. From the media buyers I’ve spoken to, that seems to be a point of pain. ”
Battelle plans to represent ad inventory on individual and group blogs through nonexclusive relationships with authors.
“People want to be buying on blogs,” he said. “They understand it’s a [channel] worthy of being in conversation with. Everyone I’ve talked to on the marketing side is aware blogs are a conversation as opposed to an interruption medium.”
