ChasNote

Last month The Economist ran a piece on top blog authors making a living as independent publishers, with a nice mention of FM:

“One big reason why his blog works as a small business, says Mr Malik [of GigaOM], is that an ecosystem of support is appearing. Like Ms Armstrong [of Dooce], he farms out advertising sales and administration to a firm called FM, launched last year by John Battelle, who once ran magazines such as Wired and the Industry Standard…. Once you have a lot of readers, however, the bandwidth costs become significant, and most medium-sized blogs cannot afford to hire the sales people needed to generate sufficient revenue. So FM’s 15 sales people negotiate with advertisers on behalf of blogs they represent, keeping 40% of the resulting revenues.”