What are your monthly impressions?
65,000,000 across 30 sites. (This counts only pages where graphical ads can be placed.)
How many unique visitors are there within your network in a given month?
Approximately 13,000,000.
How many sites are in your network?
30, adding about 10 per month.
What kind of targeting do you provide? How is this targeting achieved?
Targeting is available by content category (e.g., "wireless & broadband sites" or "parenting sites") and by site (e.g., "BoingBoing.net," "Digg.com" or "Dooce.com").
While demographic targeting via the ad server is not yet available, the site-by-site audience skews get advertisers pretty close to the same thing. Boing Boing, for example, is 90 percent male and 76 percent 18-39. Dooce is skewed female to a similar degree.
Do you accept all forms of rich media? How about video?
Creative guidelines are set by each site's author -- and, in most cases, the authors invite their readers into the decision-making process. (Federated Media's tag line is "Author Driven.") The end result is that nearly all Federated Media-affiliated sites accept rich media & animation provided animations & loops stop after 15 seconds. Video and audio must be user initiated. As several sites are expanding the video content on their sites, they have expressed interest in pre-stream and in-stream video advertising.
What is a distinguishing feature of your network? Do you cater to a particular kind of audience or site (e.g., all sports content; the network focuses on moms; the key demographic seems to be Men 18-24)?
Federated Media considers itself as much "author services" agency as it does an "advertising rep firm."
For weblog authors, this means the partnership with Federated Media brings them technical services (e.g., site design), business & audience development (e.g., content licensing), and business affairs services (e.g., legal). This also means that Federated Media can't build a sprawling network comprised of thousands of sites; we're forced to be selective about the sites we invite into the network. Selection criteria include professional-quality journalism, influence within a marketplace or community (i.e., large audiences as well as high PageRank or Technorati rank), high ethical standards & editorial transparency -- similar criteria to what John Battelle, Federated Media's chairman, used to enlist authors for Wired Magazine where he was a co-founding editor or The Industry Standard where he was founder and publisher.
So, for advertisers, working with Federated Media sites means working with the leading online publications.
Today Federated Media's largest "federation" is built around tier-one digital business and culture sites, such as Boing Boing, Digg, Metafilter, TechDirt, TechCrunch and GigaOm. Federations around parenting (current sites include Dooce.com, ParentHacks.com and MommyNeedsCoffee.com) and media and entertainment (current sites include Fark.com, Jeff Jarvis's BuzzMachine and MuseumOfHoaxes.com) are in the works, and other topic-based federations will follow.
Is there anything else you’d like to say about the network or about the online advertising industry in general (prognosis, needs for change, et cetera)?
Metrics and measurement need radical improvement.
As the consumption habits of media consumers (viewers, readers, visitors) have fragmented -- we now get our news & entertainment from dozens, if not hundreds, of sources, not three broadcast channels & two print publications -- the long-standing measurement systems (Nielsen, Arbitron, Nielsen NetRatings, comScore/Media Metrix, et cetera) are breaking down. Their panels lose statistical validity as they try to measure readership / viewership of smaller publications. Yet when you take niche cable channels and niche online publications / weblogs as a whole, these "niche" media entities are capturing significant "share of attention" or "share of viewership" among the mainstream.
What is your website?
http://fmpub.net/about