Amy Shatz has an interesting piece in today’s Wall Street Journal on the fact that presidential candidates are already buying advertising on political blogs, including this one.
“There’s a blog primary going on right now,” says Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads, a North Carolina-based advertising service which automates the process of placing ads on blogs in exchange for a 30% cut of the revenue.
Apparently, this is causing some controversy:
But this year’s campaign Web pioneers are already beginning to run into uncharted zones. Some online activists get offended if they think a candidate is paying for ads on Internet sites of the wrong political stripe. And some smaller, locally influential blogs have gotten miffed at being passed over.
When Sen. Clinton launched her bid for the Democratic nomination, her campaign purchased ads on a number of popular political blog sites, inviting people to participate in a three-night series of video Webcasts. But the Clinton team offended some Democrats by purchasing ads on at least four conservative blogs and originally passing over some smaller local bloggers. In a conversation, “you invite people who don’t necessarily agree with you,” says Mr. Daou. “We tried to reach out to as many blogs as possible.” The campaign also created hurt feelings among some more thinly read Democratic bloggers who didn’t get an ad.
In Nevada, which hosts an early primary in 2008, some local bloggers groused that the Clinton campaign focused its advertising dollars with Las Vegas-based blogs and ignored the rest of the state. “Where’s my ad?” huffed one Nevada blogger, Taylor Marsh, who wrote on her site on Jan. 22 that she found it “a little annoying that Clinton’s team thinks that people like me don’t merit advertisement, simply because our numbers don’t reach the one-hundred thousand mark.”
According to the BlogAds order page, Marsh’s blog generated 21,575 page impressions last week. She charges $65/week for ads. That’s about $3/thousand views. [Update: The Gun Toting Liberal, who’s asking $150 for 4,882 page impressions, or a whopping $30.72/thousand, has similar complaints.] During the same period, DailyKos had 4,021,511 page impressions and was charging $2,900 for a non-premium ad. That’s a mere $1.39/thousand for a much more coveted audience. That’s simple economics at work, not size discrimination.
This is amusing, too:
“I’ll take ads from pretty much anybody short of Nazis and Communists,” says Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who runs the popular conservative site Instapundit.com. “If you only take ads from folks you agree with, people will start to think your opinions are driven by the ads rather than the other way around.”
Ditto. PETA has been renewing the same ad for weeks, which I’ve continued to accept despite my objections to their platform and complaints from my wife about how disgusting the image is. That’s capitalism, folks.
