It's latest acquisition brings more than 4,400 independent food bloggers into Federated Media's advertising purview and conversely allows Foodbuzz to reach more than 14 million unique users per month. Combined with FM's other premier food sites, including Serious Eats and Bakerella, this gives marketers and advertisers a great way to engage with top-quality audiences discussing food.

At a time when advertisers are looking to dice the online audience ever finer, networks like Federated are having to build out their stables of offerings, and FoodBuzz will add to the increasingly popular food category. But with the FoodBuzz purchase, Federated will be better positioned to sell the so-called head of household category to advertisers, which refers to the person who buys the bulk of consumer packaged goods like cleaners and food products -- the domain of big ad spenders like Unilever and P&G.

FoodBuzz reached 4.8 million people in October, according to comScore, which represents over 13% of Federated's audience of 36.8 million, making this a significant audience acquisition for Federated. FM recently acquired BigTent, a community platform for local groups, and also acquired semantic-search technology from TextDigger. In addition, the company is engaged in a partnership with the Clever Girls Collective to reach audiences on more than 1,000 top-quality lifestyle blogs. Together, these deals strengthen FM's appeal to advertisers looking to reach a wide range of audiences over a variety of channels.

Headed by Wired founding editor John Battelle, Federated is one of the largest sales brokers for blogs and websites, selling advertising for publishers such as GigaOm and The Awl, as well as TechCrunch (prior to its acquisition by AOL). The company appears to be responding to the fact that banner advertising rates have remained relatively flat, largely due to the commoditization of page views and audiences through the proliferation of online ad networks.

Managing more content properties allows Federated to potentially garner more sponsorship sales with higher ad rates. Federated is currently capitalized at $57 million for a purported valuation of $200 million.