As an ad network, Six Apart is competing with Federated Media Publishing, Glam, Blogads, and others. Here’s how it will work – they will get advertisers, bloggers put the ads up, and the two share revenue (not sure what the payouts are like, but I believe it’s typical to get 20-30%). Six Apart is working with Adify to provide back end support so bloggers can see their payouts and manage their account.

What I like about Six Apart is that they are targeting their services to the little guy (or gal). Even more popular bloggers struggle to draw big name advertisers that pay well. They may be bloggers with a loyal but niche following and are good at writing but lack the know-how or clout to draw advertisers.

Most ad networks have minimum traffic and audience requirements. In this case, publishers can reject blogs they don’t want their ads to show up on. The ad network is currently in invitation-only beta and it’s just for bloggers who use Six Apart’s Vox, TypePad, or LiveJournal.

They are also providing services that help with technical problems that most bloggers face – like how to migrate your blog to another blogging platform. If you want to migrate to TypePad for example, prices start at $199.

I’ve seen companies who don’t get blogs and blogging trying to do this themselves. Then they have to start over or they’re not getting the traffic or response from their blog that they should get. I’d recommend Six Apart’s new services (especially if there was an affiliate program) but what I’d really like is a similar service from WordPress.

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 Anil Dash

The company’s advertising group has been dubbed Six Apart Media, and it "offers more control over the advertising on your blog," according to Vice President Anil Dash.  "[O]ur goal is to help you produce more revenue than the simple ubiquitous text ads that you might otherwise be using," he writes.

This will put Six Apart in the same arena as Federated Media, but the company isn’t coming unprepared.  Past Apperceptive clients include The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, BoingBoing, Major League Baseball, Gothamist, and iVillage, so the name recognition factor is pretty strong.

Then there are the actual services that Apperceptive provided to those clients.  Design, development, implementation and integration – the figurative bases are well covered.  And the Apperceptive acquisition also landed Six Apart a New York office, so its physical presence has spread, too.

Apperceptive’s price remains unknown, but credit for properly breaking the story would appear to go to a TechCrunch commenter.  Now’s an interesting time to enter the advertising business, so we’ll see how this goes.

Many know Six Apart for its blogging tools like Movable Type, Typepad, and Vox, as well as the LiveJournal service it created and sold. Alden told us Six Apart is fully funded, giving them the groundwork to create an integrated ad platform for blogging.

Part of that groundwork merited a couple of moves. Six Apart will partner with Adify to handle the back-end accounting work on the platform. Fredin said their experience handling services for companies in media and technology looking to build communities of web properties has them ready to back this platform.

Control of the platform makes money in social media, as Alden noted. “It should be able to do the same with blogging,” he said.

Six Apart also made an acquisition to support their moves toward becoming this platform. Few outside the web development community may have heard of Apperceptive, a New York-based design house; their client list includes big names like the Washington Post, Barnes & Noble, and Cond