Federated Media Publishing, founded by John Battelle, is one of the top ad networks for blogs has just received a $50 million investment from Oak Investment Partners. This is pretty interesting news. Rumors had it that the company turning down a $100 million buyout offer and some have estimated it has a value of around $200 million. Federated currently handles ad sales and other publishing services for at least 150 blogs and sites, including such popular ones as Boing Boing, GigaOm, Ars Technica, Dooce, Silicon Alley Insider, and TechCrunch.

This is both important and impressive. For many years a number of blogs in this network (and in general) have been producing some of the best content available anywhere, but not given a lot of respect. Now with Federated Media worth maybe as much as $200 million, and they don’t even own any of these blogs and have stated their explicit desire not to purchase any with their additional funding, blogs have final arrived.