FM Media Signs Digg

Disclaimer: I recently joined FM Media and am one of the bloggers in their network.

ChasNote: Is Digg the New Slashdot? In a huge addition to their Network, Chas Edwards, VP for sales and market development at FM Media, has blogged that Digg has recently signed up with FM. Already FM includes some of the top trafficked blogs on the internet including Technorati’s number one rated Boing Boing.

According to Digg CEO Jay Adelson, although they have just begun working with FM, so far they have been “very happy with the results.” Jay added that FM was a “high class operation.”

John Battelle, FM Founder, added, “we love the conversation Digg enables, and are honored to be working with them.”

Having had several of my articles appear on Digg, Slashdot and Boing Boing all three, I can personally attest that Digg is moving traffic these days on par with Boing Boing and Slashdot. Recently I blogged about Digg Founder Kevin Rose’s presentation down at Yahoo! earlier this month. At that presentation Kevin said that at present Digg has about 140,000 registered users and is serving up four to five million page views per day.

Jason Kotke recently did a comparison blogging his own thoughts on the difference between Digg traffic and Slashdot traffic.

I think that FM working with Digg makes sense. For one, FM gives their authors a great amount of freedom over what format, size and type of ads will run on your pages. You as the author in fact have total control over the ads on your site. This should sit well with Kevin’s recent comments on ads appearing on Digg: “It’s (ads) never going to be a part of the site to bombard users with ads. Ads are only on 40% of the available inventory at present. We are trying not to clutter the page with ads.”

At the same time Digg should benefit from FM’s increasing and growing clout with media buyers and their ability to offer advertisers a one stop shop where they can buy significant amount of exposure across multiple blogs and other internet sites. Certainly advertisers would rather deal with one company representing multiple bloggers than deal with 20 bloggers all directly. Also given their size I’d assume that FM would be able to negotiate better terms with advertisers than individual bloggers might be able to do on their own.

Digg’s choice of FM as a partner in their advertising is a testament to the growing influence that blog networks will play but it is also a testament to John Battelle and his team who are setting up their blog network in such a way that leaves independent site owners with significant control over their sites.