Online Publisher Realtime Offers Tech Blog Sponsorships

Internet publisher Realtime is expanding beyond its roots as an e-book publisher and moving into the realm of sponsor-supported blog sites for the tech community. The company is converting its stable of authors into daily bloggers and working with technology companies to sponsor not only those sites, but also white papers and other technical articles created by a resident expert for each site.

Realtime’s blogs include Unified Communications, IT Compliance, Windows Vista and Web Security. An additional Microsoft Windows Server site will go live by the end of the month, according to Bailey Sory, president and CEO of Realtime Publishers.

Realtime signed McAfee to sponsor a Web Security blog. The company’s IT Compliance blog, written by Rebecca Herold, will soon publish a document to be sponsored by Secure Computing.

“We’ve gone after authors that we’ve worked with that are well respected in their field of expertise, because they in many cases are going to bring in their own audience,” said Sory. “The benefit of what we’re providing in e-books and the interactive community is the notion of getting expert content and having somebody there that they can speak with as an independent voice that can give the sponsoring company some mindshare monopoly.”

Sponsors determine the general focus of content, said Sory, but defer to Realtime’s author experts on the particulars of content. “It’s all about the quality of the content… At the end of the day we serve two masters: the sponsors and the reader.”