Battelle is at the forefront of a movement attempting to answer one of the Web's most vexing questions: How do you turn blogging into a day job? Millions of people publish blogs and other niche Web sites, but they struggle to make a living from their passion.
Battelle thinks his new company, Federated Media Publishing Inc., can be part of the solution. The Sausalito (Calif.) startup is signing up hundreds of the best sites and selling their ad space to brand-name advertisers such as IBM (IBM ), Absolut, and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ). Federated Media doesn't own the blogs, as do other blogging networks such as Gawker.com, but it keeps 40% of the ad revenue and gives the rest to the site's owner. "It's kind of like a music label, except we don't control their intellectual property and tell them what to sing," says Battelle.
