Interview with John Battelle on Blogs as a Business

Posted by: Heather Green on January 30

Yesterday I chatted with John Battelle, founder of the social media network Federated Media. Here’s what he had to say, in between ordering his breakfast and heading to the airport, about the changes in blogging since our cover in 2005:

He started off by saying that blogs just kicked off the changes we’re going through. “I really fundamentally believe that blogs are part of a bigger shift in the media ecosystem. It’s what I call conversational media. There is a shift in how media and consumed and what the economics are. Blogs were just the leading edge of how people understood this and social networks became the next step.

FM is reported to have done $22 million in revenues last year, with about $14 million going to the 150 blogs, video artistes, and others that FM works. The publishers essentially outsource the sales to FM.

Here’s what he has to say about the opportunities of the new economics:
“Figuring out a publishing business around this new form of media is a huge deal. We’re doing great. The market overall will be big, and all of the traditional media companies will get in the game and plenty are getting in the game. It’s going to be a big business for FM, and for traditional media companies, particularly those that get good at shifting into this space. It’s going to be an ecosystem.”

“Marketers are the lifeblood of our industry. For a hundred years they have been trained to attach themselves to content, whether it’s Oprah or Businessweek. That content is a proxy for a great audience, an audience that’s engaged.

Now advertisers look at Facebook and say, holy s@@@, it’s so fractal, there are tens of millions of places to engage, it’s so complicated.

We figured it out by saying, lets get completely over ourselves about what a publication is, it’s a place where a community of people engage passionately around things they care bout. Now you can’t look at Facebook overall that way, but inside Facebook there are a ton of pages, and some of them are the equivalent of some really great publication with a loyal community.”

As an example, Battelle says they’re working with Graffiti Wall, the application in Facebook. He says they have 8. 5 million installs, which is easier for an advertiser to get their head around than tens of millions Facebook users overall. “Their audience is engaged in it, a graphic arts showing off community, they are young, trendy, and with Facebook, you can know a lot about them. It feels like a publication, just like Wired feels like a publication.” Battelle also says he’s getting $10 to $15 CPMs, which seems awfully high and makes me wonder if advertiser would pay that over time.

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