The recent Online Media, Marketing and Advertising (OMMA) conference in San Francisco had the usual panel discussions relating to the sheer number of blogs, and their role vs. traditional media. But this audience has a different concern, since they are clearly looking for ways to utilize this new media for advertising and marketing purposes. The sheer size of advertising budgets is overwhelming to new media. According to Mediapost, the top 10 advertisers spent $4.8 Billion just in Q1, 2005. Now let's compare this scale to the typical blogger, who could be compared to a newsletter publisher, with a niche circulation, looking for ways to monetize the content without alienating readers.

Visionary John Battelle has stepped into that gap with the announcement of his new FM Publishing (for Federated Media), to aggregate high authority blogs into an advertising network, focusing initially on technology arena. This will be a win-win situation for both advertisers and bloggers as publishers, since large advertisers have difficulty dealing with individual blogs, and bloggers want to retain control over the advertising that would appear on their site. As a publisher, respected journalist and blogger himself, John is well positioned to address those sensitivities by making the network non-exclusive (unlike Google) and addressing channel concerns. This is definitely a venture to follow, from both the marketing perspective and the blogging perspective!