Gone are guaranteed payments of “$100-$200/month” plus bonuses for traffic. In its place are much smaller guaranteed payments plus monthly bonuses for “press coverage you or your blog gets, exclusive interviews you land and growth of your blog.” Blogs can also get a quarterly bonus based on a scoring system.

The traffic bonus system was over-rewarding bloggers, says Wright. The new system will likely result in a big pay cut, but Wright says it’s necessary to align incentives:

I’m sure by now you’ve run your blog through the system above and realized that (with a handful of exceptions), due to the change to Omniture as a stats package, your pay will go down. For some it will go down significantly. Obviously this isn’t the intent of the new pay system, it was just the flaw in the previous stats package. For the last two years, b5 has been effectively paying bloggers 2-3x more in traffic bonuses than they were actually getting. While, again, this isn’t a blogger’s fault, neither is the new pay system about “cutting pay”. Any reduction in pay is due almost exclusively to the reality of using an inaccurate pay system in the past vs an industry standard third-party audited system going forward.

While this is certainly not good news for the already low paid bloggers in the b5Media network, it isn’t necessarily a sign that the company itself is failing. Rumor is that b5Media has raised a new round of financing and will be announcing it soon. In April, we reported that merger discussions with Technorati fell through at the last minute.

The full email memo is below. I’ve contacted Wright for a comment.

NY-based content ratings and recommendations provider Outbrain has announced a new distribution partnership with blog network b5media this morning. Under the terms of the partnership, b5media will install the ratings and recommendations widget on all 300+ blogs in the b5media network. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

The Outbrain widget allows blog readers to rate the quality of the content and receive recommendations for other content based on their ratings. Recommendations can come from the individual site or a whitelist can be setup where sites can partner together and recommendations are shared across the listed network. 

The more sites that Outbrain can partner with, the stronger their recommendations network becomes. From my perspective that’s where the Outbrain value lies. The raw ratings are not worth a lot to me as I am never sure what it is that the person is ranking. It could be spelling, grammar, quality of the content, subject matter, etc.

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Jeremy Wright, b5media CEO, has posted an open letter this evening to the staff and bloggers from Know More Media. He opens the letter by saying that various sources are telling him that Know More Media is closing shop soon, as early as next week. I sure hope that the KMM bloggers and staff already know this and aren’t first learning about it here or on Jeremy’s blog!

Jeremy notes that bloggers will have the option to buy their Know More Media blogs and run them on their own. Jeremy says that he is open to acquiring the blogs and incorporating them into the b5media blog network. He notes, "We will ask that you blog for $50 for the first month, while we ascertain the value and advertising potential of the blog. After that month, we will likely need to restructure the network (there’s a reason it wasn’t making any money), redo the pay structure and even let some bloggers go. But, if you let us, we will turn the network around and make it profitable. We are fully committed to doing what’s fair (and in many ways, being more than just fair)."

Jeremy also is willing to discuss hiring the staff at Know More Media along with attempting to contact the Know More Media owners to look at a full acquisition. He says that b5media is the only blog network that can takeover their network with little muss or fuss.

Check out my interview with Jeremy and all of our b5media coverage to learn more about their blog network.

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b5media and Chitika have announced a partnership today that will bring Chitika’s advertising program to the 350+ blogs that are in the b5media blog network. This is a huge distribution deal for Chitika. Financial terms of the deal were not provided.

On one of the private advertising forums I am a part of, we’ve been discussing Chitika a lot recently. Chitika has been spamming marketing to many of the larger blogs and Web sites with the following pitch:

I would like to speak to the person that manages online advertising for xyz.com. Chitika provides a service that automatically matches highly relevant and targeted ads with web site content. Through our *Premium* program publishers like you are earning as much as $31.00 eCPM rates.

You can read about our *Premium* program at X. Please let me know who I should contact. Thanks.

Jeff Sable, Vice President - Chitika

The feedback so far has been that Chitika is sending the same email to everyone with the $31/CPM rates even in very different industries. One of the sites signed up with Chitika after reading this email and two months in, is earning 10 cent CPM rates. Another reported making pennies a day even with decent traffic. Are you using Chitika - if so, please report in with your findings. Perhaps Chitika can share who is making $31 cpm rates with their service.

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Simple ad management tool Adregate has been acquired by "new owners" founder Josh Pigford noted in an email to customers on Tuesday. Adregate has been in development for two years and officially went live a month ago. I’ve written before that OpenAds OpenX is overwhelming for the beginner with online advertising management and there is room for startups to enter the space. From what I can tell in some limited testing, Adregate appears to be a solid solution in the entry-level advertising management space.

Here is the complete email sent to Adregate customers:

== Adregate Sale ==

This email is to let you know about the recent sale of Adregate.

This past week all of Adregate’s assets (code, design, database) were sold to another company. This is not a "liquidation" of assets but rather a transfer in which the new owners will continue to run and develop Adregate.

We (Sabotage Media) will no longer be involved with the application in any way.

== Server Move ==

In the next 48 hours Adregate will be transferred to a new server and with that comes a possibility for a small amount of downtime.

We will continue to answer any questions you have until the server move is done, after which the new owners will take over all inquiries.

Thank you so much for being a part of Adregate over the past two years. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we have.

Josh Pigford
Adregate

Thanks to Winston Ford for the tip.

Check out the printer we used for our business cards:

Source:CenterNetworks

Blog network b5media has announced the departure of technology director Aaron Brazell today. Brazell has a departure post on his personal blog Technosailor. Brazell will remain on staff until a replacement is located.

Brazell notes on his future plans, "At this point, I’m not sure what those next steps are but I have options. I’d like to develop Mokonji a bit more. I also have a few other venturistic ideas floating around in my head and I want to spend some time focusing more on the DC community that has sprung up around here. The eager anticipation of the “what’s next” is crazy for me right now. It’s sort of like going out on a date for the first time. You don’t know what to expect but you know you really, really like the girl a lot."

Check out our interview with b5media CEO Jeremy Wright where he discusses the blog network, funding and expansion plans.

I’ve just received word that former Blognation Canada Editor Tris Hussey has joined b5media as Training Manager. In a chat with Tris, he noted that he will be handling blogger and channel editor training along with other duties. In addition, Tris will also be re-launching MapleLeaf2.0 within the b5media network.

"I’ve worked with Tris in 3 different companies I’ve started, he’s an absolute star and knows and loves bloggers," said b5media President and CEO Jeremy Wright. "It’s my pleasure to be working with him again and to be able to utilize so many of his talents in his new role. And welcoming him back to the b5media family after a brief hiatus is as sweet as deep fried brownies."

Check out my interview with Jeremy from last year where he describes how b5media works, the payout structure for blogs, comparisons to other blog networks such as 9rules.

Congrats to Tris and Jeremy and I look forward to reading the Canadian perspective on tech from Tris.

Today was the "bonus" day at Blog World Expo. The convention center was very quiet today - I can only guess that many didn’t know about today as the BWE web site shows a start date of Nov 8th. Oh well, more open stalls for me.

I spent the day with the b5media crew - what a great bunch of people. There is a strong family feel to the group. All of the sessions were good and from speaking with the attendees, they obtained good value from each session. I would like to thank Jeremy Wright for giving me the opportunity to speak with him. It was great and I look forward to more speaking gigs in 2008 - would love to do a panel with Marshall and Jeremiah, that’d rock. And Om Malik - I will bring the NY’er out of him!

Tonight was the b5media party at the Luxor - top shelf all the way! Asian place with lots of food options. And I am not naming names but one of the people at my table was able to drink 12 year old rum from Guatemala.

Check out a full recap of the day’s discussions at After the Launch blogger Shama Hyder and About.com blogger Deborah Ng (though she spelled my name wrong!).

Check out my photos on Flickr.

NY-based Glam Media, the women’s publisher network has hired Scott Swanson as the GM and VP of the Glam Media Publisher Network. Glam has added some key executives in October including Joe Lagani, Vice President & General Manager of GlamLiving and John Trimble, EVP of Sales.

"Scott’s background at Tribal Fusion, Flycast and other top internet networks makes him the ideal hire as we continue to build the most powerful media network of life and style sites on