Deals

Ars Technica, a technology site with more than 30 million monthly page views, will become part of WIRED Digital, operating as an independent, publisher Conde Naste said Monday.

The announcement was made by Sarah Chubb, president of CondéNet, the digital division of Condé Nast, which has managed the growth of the WIRED Digital sites, and David Carey, group president, Condé Nast, who oversees the sales and marketing efforts for WIRED Digital.

“We welcome Ars Technica to WIRED Digital and Condé Nast, as we believe this fantastic site allows us to accelerate our expansion by tapping into a vital and sophisticated community,” Sarah Chubb, president of CondéNet, the digital division of Condé Nast, said. “WIRED Digital can now provide a network of highly trafficked technology sites that attract an engaged, tech-savvy reader.”

In addition, Webmonkey, the popular web developer tutorial site, will be re-launched under WIRED Digital. Plans are also underway to revive HotWired.com, recognized as a pioneer in the industry as one of the first commercial web brands.

The combined sites of WIRED Digital now reach close to 19 million unique visitors per month.

Founded in 1998 by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes, Ars Technica produces tech news and analysis. Based in Boston, MA, Ars Technica will soon open offices in Chicago and San Francisco. Ars Technica will continue to be managed by Fisher, who will report to Chubb.

“We are delighted to be a part of WIRED Digital and the larger Condé Nast family,” Ken Fisher, Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica said. “The strength of our brand combined with the expertise and resources of WIRED Digital will dramatically accelerate the growth of Ars Technica. Combined, we continue our quest to build an even better resource for our ever-expanding community of readers who not only need to keep up on technology, but are also passionate about it.”

Terms of the Ars Technica acquisition were not disclosed.

Internet retailer Amazon has unveiled the Amazon MP3 Clips Widget, allowing blogs and other sites to play portions of songs available from the company’s catalog of digital music.

Part of the Amazon Associates affiliate program, the MP3 widget can either display a list of songs or play songs chosen by visitors. The Amazon Associates program gives bloggers up to 10 percent in referral fees whenever a user clicks on and purchases an Amazon product.

“The extensive variety of artists available to download on the Amazon MP3 site makes this a perfect match for us to promote upcoming shows at all of our venues,” said Oscar Sagastume, Internet Marketing Manager, Hard Rock Hotel & Casino.

Along with the MP3 widget, Amazon also introduced affilliate options for the Kindle e-reader and Amazon’s Unbox video sales.

Duncan Riley, a year after joining Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch, is leaving the popular site. Riley, who wrote an article about Yahoo Buzz that went on to be the site’s most-read story, will open his own tech blog, Inquisitr.

Arrington twice said Riley will be “greatly missed” and said the two parted on good terms. A long-known proponent of combining blogs into an unstoppable force, Arrington said he hoped to buy Inquisitr someday and bring Riley back.

TechCrunch has served as a bit of grapefruit league for bloggers, becoming the launchpad of ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick and CNet’s Natalie Del Conte, among others.

Riley told Pro Blogging News that Arrington hired a new blogger, Jason Kincaid a month ago. “He’s young and still a little raw but he has a lot of potential,” he said by e-mail.

Although he was the only full-time TC writer when he began as a contract blogger a year ago, Riley told Pro Blogging News the tech site now has three others.

Before appearing on the pages of TechCrunch, Riley has launched and sold a number of high-profile sites, including Blog Herald (created in 2002, sold in 2006) and Canadian-based blog network B5 Media (which he helped found in 2005 with Darren Rowse and Jeremy Wright.) A year later B5 received $2 million in venture funding.

On his personal blog, Riley gives some oft-quoted reasons for departing the high-stress life of a TechCrunch blogger:

• “I want my weekends back (although it wont happen for sometime, but at least I have control over that aspect.)
• “I’m a little tired (the whole Louis Gray thing being case in point.)
• “I feel that if I’m going to kill myself doing this (blogging) it should be building something I own or have a stake in.”

Riley’s former boss recently told the New York Times the stress of competitive blogging caused him to gain 30 pounds in three months and expects to be hospitalized. Other bloggers have died or been forced to adopt healthier lifestyles. What sort of stress will remaining Tech Crunch bloggers have to endure?

The outgoing tech blogger also mentions the desire to have a “stake in” his writing. The explanation brings up the subject of how Tech Crunch bloggers are paid. Arrington nemesis Nick Denton, who overseas the Gawker empire, has come under fire for his decision to pay bloggers based on how much traffic they generate. Do Tech Crunch bloggers operate under similar sliding scales?

Whatever reason for Riley’s departure from Tech Crunch, who will fill his writing shoes? Currently, the task is split among Arrington and several other bloggers, including Erick Schonfeld, a journalistic pro Arrington hired in 2007 as co-editor.

Despite Arrington’s fond farewell send-off for Riley, financial questions remain:

• Do Tech Crunch bloggers sign a non-compete clause?

Riley has opened Inquisitr, which touches on technology, but at the moment, it includes news broken by other sources. If Riley starts breaking news - and particularly startup-related items - will Arrington become less chummy?

Riley told Pro Blogging News as a contractor he never signed a non-compete clause and wasn’t sure if full-time bloggers were required.

• Will Riley share in the profit from traffic generated by the thousands of posts he wrote while at TC?

If not, TC is a write-for-hire shop, one of the least-desirable arrangements for writers. However, Riley later got back to us, explaining TC hadn’t gone down the Gawker path.

“Not at all. I was always paid a flat rate per month irrespective of the traffic,” he said.

Adify, the San Bruno, Calif. online advertising back office company, was acquired for around $300 million by Cox Enterprises,  the parent company of Cox Newspapers and Cox Communications. Adify has become the go-to shop for Fortune, Martha Stewart and others looking to create their own ad networks.

PaidContent is reporting Adify earned a 20 percent cut from revenues of each white-label ad network it managed. The company, which had a $3 million investment from NBC Universal, is on target this year to quadruple its $7 million revenue of 2007.

For Cox, the deal will likely be used to boost its cable holdings as well as supplant income being lost as the newspaper industry continues to bleed out.

Another reason for the buy: Cox is prepping its own ad network, according to marketing guru Andy Beal.

Adify will retain its independence and its 80 workers, the AP is reporting.

Federated Media, the upscale blog network with eyes to become a media company, let slip a few details about its plan. The pitch to bloggers: we’ll invest in you if you sign-up for long term ad contracts.

“If some of the blogs want to take some money off the table so that they can put their kids through college, we would be able to help them do that,” Neil Chase, vice president of Author Services at FM told our friends over at Silicon Valley Watcher.

Chase said FM was looking to invest 10-15 percent in blogs in exchange for longer ad contracts. This comes as the ad network finds clients aren’t so quick to buy-in as pre-recession days.

Earlier this month, John Battelle distanced his network from others, saying FM was a “cousin” to ad networks. Flush from receiving a $50 million investment, Battelle said FM is a “digital media and publishing company.”

We’d all like to attract the spontaneous buyer, the online equivalent of the consumer than picks up $20 worth of items while waiting in line to purchase the $1.50 candy bar. Well, 24/7 Real Media, the New York-based marketing company has signed up to target consumers based on their psychographic profile.

Mindset Media says it can track 20 different types of personality types, including assertiveness, creativity, self-esteem, and spontaneity.

“Every brand in the modern market has a psychographic target, and the more competitive the category, the more that target matters on the bottom line,” Jim Meyer, CEO and co-founder of Mindset Media, said in statement. “We are very proud to partner with 24/7 Real Media. Together, we make the Internet work harder for brands.”

WordPress guru Matt Mullenweg announced Friday a deal with Sphere to provide “possibly related” links for users of both the blog hosting service and self-hosted blogging software. The news from Web 2.0 Expo was part of an announcement the Automattic founder had promised Thursday.

Although available since 2005-2006 for blogs in general, this WordPress-specific feature is aimed at boosting traffic for small blogs, or the majority of micro publishers on the open-source platform. In particular, the feature will list a blog’s related posts and then posts on other WordPress sites using the new Sphere tool. Sites will have to opt-in to the service.

With Sphere one of the top feature requests from WordPress.com users, the creation of a WordPress-specific offering is a feather in Mullenweg’s cap. For the San Francisco, Calif.-based Sphere, which was recently acquired by AOL for a reported $25 million, the deal widens AOL’s blog audience to the 168 million WordPress.com users and the millions of self-hosted blogs powered by the WordPress.org software.

CNet’s Rafe Needleman noted Sphere will use the click data acquired through the network of WordPress blogs to “potentially make it available for other upcoming WordPress features.” Such data could be a treasure trove for the WordPress/Automattic/AOL triumvirate.

Six Apart, the San Francisco-based blogging software company, Monday announced it has acquired Apperceptive, a New York City “social media” agency that has worked with Huffington Post, Boing Boing, Gothamist and other blogs. The move, part of Six Apart’s effort to transform itself into an ad network, brings it into competition with high-toned Federated Media.

No terms of the acquisition were released.

Unlike John Battelle’s Federated Media, Six Apart brings a publishing platform, plus the TypePad blog host service. In recent interviews, Battelle has hinted he may like to do more than serve ads to blogs, but assist their growth.

In a statement, Six Apart said the acquisition will allow it to “provide new advertising, design, implementation and site optimization services to bloggers and companies of all sizes.”

Six Apart and Apperceptive are not strangers. The New York company has worked with the blogging software provider for two years.

As part of the acquisition, Six Apart will move its headquarters to the center of New York City’s advertising district.

Six Apart will use Apperceptive to launch the Six Apart Services side of its new business.

“Our services team is dedicated to bringing all the power of social communication to every blogging community, using Six Apart platforms in connection with all of today’s leading web technologies,” Anil Dash wrote at the company’s blog.

In addition, Six Apart unveiled Six Apart Media, aimed at helping bloggers succeed. As part of that, the company introduced its own premium advertising program and gave some reasons for why it is better than the many other ad networks.

Can Six Apart succeed in the social media ad space where it is losing to WordPress and Google in the blog hosting arena? Can the company differentiate itself from the sea of other ad networks? We’ll have to wait and see.

In a response to Pro Blog News questions, B5 Media CEO Jeremy Wright Sunday refused to publicly comment on last week’s report the Canadian blog network had considered merging with troubled blog search engine Technorati. Wright said Friday’s Tech Crunch post “Secret Merger Talks Between Technorati and b5Media Blow Up” is “90 percent false.”

“We can’t and don’t comment on rumours, especially ones that are 90 percent false and written by competitors without calling to fact-check,” wrote Wright in an e-mail.

Although B5 isn’t talking publicly about the episode, Wright said they’ve already informed B5 employees.

“The storm’s died down, and the people who care (our bloggers) have gotten an answer internally,” he told Pro Blogging News.

Friday, Tech Writer writer Erick Schonfeid, citing a source “familiar with the negotiations”, said talks “blew up” earlier last week when a merger was just “days away” from being announced. The site said CEO personality conflicts and Technorati’s lack of forthcoming doomed the tie-up.

An agreement would have given Technorati a hand recreating itself as a blog ad network. At one point, the company was shopping the idea, complete with pitch slides highlighting the benefits of such a merger. For B5, a merger would mean a greater valuation to investors.

Wright, although dismissing 90 percent of the report as bunk, leaves open the door that 10 percent of the tale was true. Which 10 percent was accurate? The B5 CEO isn’t talking.