Hasta La Creative!

Ad Age is running two articles about blogs stepping out of their pajamas and into neatly tailored suits.

One piece is about John Battelle’s Federated Media announcing a $50 million minority investment from Oak Investment Partners. Federated Media aggregates and packages popular blog content for marketers. The company is thought to be worth as much as $200 million.

The other article looks at music blogs being sold and in other cases making deals with mainstream media companies.

Gawker Media kicked off the round of deals this week by selling off Idolator, its music blog, to Buzznet, a social-networking site that recently added the popular music site Stereogum to its network. Now two independent-music magazines, Fader and Paste, are looking to the music blogosphere to add some reach to their online-ad buys.

Paste Magazine is looking to aggregate for advertisers via its new Paste Nation network. The new partnership brings 11 music and movie blogs to the Paste online network (including PopMatters, Spout and Virb), totaling 4.3 million unique visitors and over 28 million page views per month. Not only is it a scale play for Paste, it’s a targeting opportunity for non-endemic advertisers seeking to seeking to align their brands to different music- and movie-based activities.

I know MSM is busy blogging and playing the social media game now, but I like the recognition here that a new PopMatters can’t be easily created. Thus, working in concert with established online destinations–and popular music blogs are all of that–is a good move for a print book like Paste.

On a related note, I write a music blog, albeit one far down the long tail.