Federated Media Receives a $50MM Investment

Press Release here. Tremendously proud to be a part of the FM family. I joined late last year and have had a blast.

Lots of discussion in the blogosphere. I will let that go on but can’t help but highlight a blog post from a FM client, Jeff Lanctot at Avenue A. A bit here:

I’ll save the questions around valuation of the company for the investors. However, I can say that FM has established a nice track record with Avenue A | Razorfish (my employer) over the last several quarters. Looking back to 2007, we spent nearly 4X more with FM in the second half of the year than we did in the first half. In the first quarter of 2008, our spend with FM matched all of calendar year 2007.

Portals losing share to more focused sites

Interesting study (registration required) by Avenue A/Razorfish tracking ad spending from Avenue A’s $735 million in billings. The study is coming out today but Media Post had a sneak peak and files this report.

What caught my eye:

Overall, vertical sites accounted for 39% of spending; search, 31%; portals, 19%; and ad networks, 11%.

Underscoring the continuing shift away from portals to more targeted properties, the agency last year more than doubled the number of sites it bought ads on, from 863 to 1,832.