Om Malik, the head of the Giga Omni Media group of tech blogs, said on Friday he is moving his ad business from John Battelle's Federated Media to a new advertising network IDG launched in March.
The companies, which have partnered for three years (and weathered differences of opinion involving a scandal over "conversational marketing" in which the writing of Malik, Battelle, and other bloggers was featured in ads for Microsoft), are splitting amicably. They are characterizing the move as them having grown in different directions, according to Malik and Federated Media Publisher Chas Edwards.
Giga Omni Media's seven Web sites are small vertical sites, which are more suited for a company with a trade publishing background like IDG, Edwards said in an interview.
Meanwhile, "the Federated Media approach is the Conde Nast or Time Inc. approach, (working with) larger brands, fewer of them, and national and global advertisers," he said. "Our model has not been well-suited to take those smaller sites where they wanted to go.
"I think it's actually a wonderful move for Om and, frankly, for Federated Media," Edwards added.
In a blog posting, Malik explained the situation like this:
"Progress is often accompanied by a divergence of ideas and ambitions within partnerships. At Giga Omni Media, we have been developing a network that revolves around niche verticals. As our needs became more specialized, we sat down with the folks at Federated to try and figure out how we could continue to work together. But both sides quickly realized that instead it was time to wrap up what has been a successful business relationship."
The situation is completely different from the circumstances that led to news aggregator Digg to switch from Federated Media to Microsoft for its advertising last year. While Microsoft serves up the contextual and display ads on Digg, Federated Media handles the sponsorships, including some banner ads, Edwards said.
Giga Omni Media, the blog network that encompasses flagship GigaOm and six others (including NewTeeVee and Earth2Tech), has raised $4.5 million in a round led by Alloy Ventures.
"The shift of audiences and ad dollars to online media from more traditional mediums has been significant on many levels, not least of which has been how it's created opportunities for new models such as ours," founder Om Malik wrote in a blog post announcing the funding. "What hasn't changed is a desire on the part of business and technology audiences for in-depth, insightful coverage, which is what we are committed to providing."
Raising money now is also a buffer against the rough economy, as all signs point to a drop in digital ad spending. "The whiplash-inducing bad winds that are plaguing the overall economy will cast a pall on Silicon Valley in general and online media as well," Malik wrote in the blog post. "So it's nice to have the ability to grow even in the face of adversity, whether organically or through acquisitions."
Previously, Giga Omni Media had raised two rounds from True Ventures, which also contributed to this most recent round.
Blog network GigaOm has launched OStatic to cover open-source software.
OStatic is an example of GigaOm's beyond-blogging approach, integrating various services as part of a more complete microsite. In addition to blogs, OStatic includes a comprehensive directory of 150,000 open-source applications (similar to SourceForge), 30,000 closed-source applications, and a question-and-answer forum similar to Yahoo Answers. Readers can participate by contributing product reviews.
"We plant to track open source as a business and to make it easy to access information about various open-source projects," said Om Malik, founder and editor of GigaOm.
OStatic has about nine contributors who will be blogging about the news and events shaking up the open-source world.
The timing is right for OStatic as evidenced by growing acceptance of open source in corporations and the increasing valuations of open-source companies, Malik said. Sun Microsystems, for example, recently acquired MySQL for $1 billion.
OStatic was built in conjunction with Vox Holdings.
(Credit:
GigaOm)
BlackBerry fiends looking for a better Web browser to replace the in-house solution provided by RIM have been able to use a mobile version of Opera called Opera Mini since late last year. The latest beta of the browser got an interesting refresh this morning adding a slew of handy features, including a new landscape mode that's turning phones on their sides. Literally.
(Credit:
Opera Software)
The new feature will let you browse sideways, making use of the taller screens on phones like the Pearl. Unlike the iPhone, the lack of an accelerometer in most phones means you have to use a button combination to swap between portrait and landscape modes. There's also a new full screen mode to let you browse using every glorious pixel on your phone's small screen.
BlackBerry users are getting more love with this update, like native phone menus, and "a ton" of optimizations to make pages and Web content load faster. The latest release also features a desktoplike layout mode just like the one in Safari for the iPhone, which the company launched in late June.
Besides looks, there's a new custom search creation tool that will let you save any site-specific search into the browser's built-in search tool. For example, while browsing MLB.com, you could add MLB's search box to the browser and have it ready to search from in the future, avoiding the need to visit the site first and use up that extra bit of data.
More about the update can be found on Opera's blog. To download it now, go here.
[via GigaOm]
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