Federated Media has been our advertising partner since December 2005. The first checks they sent us allowed TechCrunch to become something more than a guy sitting in a spare bedroom talking about startups to a small audience. Revenue from Federated Media let me hire our first few writers and helped accelerate our growth to the point where we are today. We've had our very vocal dustups with Federated Media over the years, but the fact is that we owe FM a lot, and I'm somewhat sad to announce today that our relationship with them is coming to an end (see Federated's announcement here ). We'll no longer be working with them on ad sales. We've long sold many of our ads directly, and as of now we'll be taking control of 100% of TechCrunch network ad inventory. In some ways this is a rite of passage for our still-young blog network. TechCrunch is starting to grow up. We now have six full-time writers on TechCrunch, and our total writing staff across our network is 20 bloggers strong. The TechCrunch Network now reaches more than 5.5 million unique visitors per month and 15 million page views (TechCrunch proper is more than 3 million uniques and 10 million page views / month.) In short, we’re finally getting big enough to matter directly to advertisers and agencies. I’m personally excited about our new direction. Heather Harde , our CEO, has deep experience in sales and has acquired advertising technology companies in her previous job at News Corp. She's got a lot of ideas on where online advertising is going. And as our CrunchCam shows, she can get an ad unit on just about anything .