Goodnight Pajamas Media

Blogads.com’s first competitor is the first to give up.

Pajamas Media was our first blog advertising competitor, created in November 2005 by a bunch of conservative and libertarian bloggers we’d previously worked with.

PJ’s ringleaders looked at our success and said, “Gee, that looks really easy. Let’s get someone to give us $3 million and we’ll kick Blogads’ butt.” That’s almost an exact quote, though I can’t point to source documents. (Anyone?) They went out and recruited ~75 conservative and libertarian bloggers we worked with. (Not everyone who joined PJ thought we were stupid or PJ was brilliant — a few remained friends, but went to PJ for outrageous guarantees.)

A year later, PJ’s management went back to their investor, a conservative billionaire [name?], and got another $3 million. Or was it $5 million? And that’s what they’ve done each year since. Until now…

As Pajamas wrote its bloggers yesterday:

As the end of the first quarter approaches and we near the production phase of Pajamas TV, we will continue to build our emphasis in this area. As a result we have decided to wind down the Pajamas Media Blogger and advertising network effective March 31, 2009. The PJM portal and the XPressBlogs will continue as is.

PJ’s fairly negative (and still not updated) history is here. And sadly, still no mention this Dunkirk-scale retreat on the front page of PJ’s site.

We’ll likely start working with some of these folks again via the conservative hive.