Last week, Federated took down the landing page for media buyers to make buys for SB Nation and subsequently SB Nation took down their Federated partner logo over the weekend and replaced it with their new Brash logo. While their has been significant churn at Federated with its larger publishers (TechCrunch and GigaOM), it seems that sports category has been harder then their other content niches. SB Nation joins Bleacher Report who left to work with Funny or Die. These two loses have dramatically lowered the footprint Federated has in sports, but was eluded to when CEO John Batelle remarked a shift away from display advertising and back to conversational marketing. Below is a video of Glam and Brash CEO, Samir Arora, talking about the company’s strategic move to work with male focused content publishers.
Disclosure: My current employer still works with Federated Media and are now their largest sports publisher. I have no idea how that relationship is doing and this blog is independent of my consulting relationship with Watercooler Sports.
