Federated Media Grows Network, Partners with comScore

Federated Media Publishing has signed a number of new sites and partnered with comScore Networks to improve measurement of blogs and other conversational media.

Federated Media, which already represents sites like Digg, Boing Boing and Dooce, several months ago halted signing new publishers in order to better scale its author and advertiser services. But now Federated Media has added 20 new sites, including PROTRADE, Baseball Reference, Wil Wheaton dot Net and video site Ask a Ninja.

“We apply our own internal editorial filter to who we onboard and when, based on a number of components,” said Jason Weisberger, chief operating officer for Federated Media. “We like to work with the highest quality independent authors on the Internet and represent them to major advertisers.”

While the majority of new authors to the Federated Media site are text-and-image-based, new recruit Ask a Ninja is a breakaway video hit. “With our partnership with Ask a Ninja, you can interpret that as we’re moving into the video space,” said Weisberger.

Another expansion for FM is its partnership with Internet metrics firm comScore Networks to improve audience measurement in “the conversational media and blogging sector.” Under the agreement, comScore will build a database weighted specifically for such sites.

“Digg is a huge site where we’re seeing over a 120 million views a month, but they were reporting two to three million. There was that much of a disconnect,” said Weisberger. “So we’ve been working with them on their reporting inside this space.”

Additional new sites in FM’s network include Ars Technica, Breitbart.com, CoasterBuzz, HockeyBuzz, Instructables, Laughing Squid, LifeClever, RealTravel, Rocketboom, Sweetney, Sweet Juniper, Trend Hunter and others.

Federated Media was founded by John Battelle in 2005.