The intention of the site is quite similar to many other news aggregators. But the realization is much better. Techmeme’s revenue stream is as simple as it is good. They sell sponsored posts. These posts are integrated in an informationstream and are marked with a grey background. So they are not annoying flashing ads popping up and moving around but rather paid PR with interesting content. This revolutionary sponsoring model is the only revenue stream, but a very efficient one. And it works due to its average 230.000 unique users every day. Founder Gabe Rivera describes the way the sponsored feeds are working:

“The way it works is simple. A sponsor’s blog feed is polled every few minutes, the latest post of which appears in its assigned slot (first, second, or third).”

For me, Techmeme is a good approach to integrate paid content in a popular news blog. Through the sponsoring model the advertisments get more attention and the way the companies transport their marketing and PR stuff has to be more sophisticated since the sensitive blogosphere does not excuse marketing mistakes. And honestly I also read the sponsored story because I naively still don’t believe that every company is sneaky.