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Archives: February 2004
Campaign manager: blogads a wonderful system
The campaign manager for one of the congressional campaigns came back last week to renew some blogads. Afterwards he sent this note:
"Your purchasing engine is extremely easy to use for both the initial purchase and ad updates. I think this is a wonderful system.
Roman Levit
Campaign Manager
Barrow for Congress"
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The whirl of global trade
Thomas Friedman visits a company in India that handles work sent from the US. Aren't you stealing jobs from the US, he asks an an Indian manager?
Well, he answered patiently, "look around this office." All the computers are from Compaq. The basic software is from Microsoft. The phones are from Lucent. The air-conditioning is by Carrier, and even the bottled water is by Coke, because when it comes to drinking water in India, people want a trusted brand. On top of all this, says Mr. Nagarajan, 90 percent of the shares in 24/7 are owned by U.S. investors. This explains why, although the U.S. has lost some service jobs to India, total exports from U.S. companies to India have grown from $2.5 billion in 1990 to $4.1 billion in 2002. What goes around comes around, and also benefits Americans.(Via Outside the beltway.)
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Atrios profile
A profile of Atrios. You can get a great advertising deal & help buy Atrios' next martini or three here.
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Mitsubishi
In todays WSJ, Mylene Mangalindan takes a detailed look at the resurgence of online advertising, focusing on Mitsubishi, which has done a number of ad campaigns online and is boosting its online spend 50% in 2004 to $6 million. The company "increased spending after each successful Internet campaign by slicing money out of its billboard and print publication budgets." Now, Mitsubishi's online ads have cut the company's "cost per sale -- the amount of money spent on advertising divided by the number of cars sold -- to one third of the cost of traditional advertising media."
For you skimmers here's the point: ONE THIRD. The economics of traditional publishing are disintegrating fast.
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Gandering
Andrew Sullivan needles conservative Protestants for their hypocrisy.
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WSJ columnist: I am a voracious reader of blogs
WSJ columnist Lee Gomes: "blogs are becoming an alternative-news universe, giving everyone with a PC and a Web connection access to the sorts of gossip that was once available only to reporters on the press bus... I am, in my private life, a voracious reader of these things, as are most of my friends, reporters included." (Via Political Wire.)
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Order form sorting disfunction
Looks like our order form is screwy. We've been reinforcing the counting mechanisms, which seems to have thrown off the catalog of blogs. Two steps forward, one step back. We're doing a veritable jig these days. Should be fixed Monday morning.
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The bad old days, etc
As safe outlets for Serpico's whistleblowing evaporate, his buddy Bob Blair says, "we could even talk to a guy I know at the New York Times." Today, Serpico would undoubtedly turn to a blogger as his advocate of last resort. (I'd love to see more alternate histories woven with blogs.)
Last night watched a talent show rehearsal. We spent the afternoon playing basketball outside, girls against boys.
This morning, I enjoyed my buddy Steve's latest post about crafting a table. This is part nine!
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Atrios ad policy and Budapest coverage of Chandler
Atrios explores the link between Congressional elections and blog advertising. He's right that few candidates will match Chandler's 50-fold return on blog advertising. He writes: "I do think that there are a lot of campaigns out there who will be able to make Blogs work for them, but it's going to take a bit more than simply placing ads. If everyone jumps on the ad-placing bandwagon, and then they sit back and wait for the money to roll in, then I'll get a nice fat check from Blogads but it won't necessarily do much for the campaigns." He observers: "The key thing blogs provide is a way to personalize your campaign. Aside from getting the attention of the bloggers themselves, I think ads get a positive reaction from blog readers because they perceive that the campaigns take this seriously. And, then, when they click through the website they want to see something more than just a standard impersonal campaign website which is rarely updated. Nobody thinks that twenty bucks buys them face time with a candidate, but people donate because they think their twenty bucks is being bundled with a hundred other peoples', and suddenly that makes them part of an interest group which, collectively, wants to feel it's being heard."
It's worth remembering that when Chandler's campaign manager, Mark Nickolas, originally talked to me about Blogads, he hoped to break even. I secretly thought he could do more than that, but didn't want to overpromise. The big test for campaigns will be in their willingness to tweak both their ads and their landing pages. Too often, in the bustle of the campaign, ads become frozen in time. Making a new pitch can hit a whole new slice of a blog's readership.
BTW, a colleague in Budapest sent a translated version of the Wire News article about Chandler's blogads that had shown up in the newsletter of the Hungarian Információs Társadalom- és Trendkutató Központ. .
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Blog advertiser goes to Congress
Ben Chandler, blog advertiser and Democratic candidate for U.S. Congress, won his special election today in Kentucky. Josh Marshall notes that this was also a victory for Internet fundraising:
As you'll notice there on the left, the Chandler campaign has been advertising for about the last two weeks on this and a number of other blogs. The campaign budgeted about two grand for blog advertising. And my understanding is that by today they had raised close to $100,000 from contributors who linked through from those blogs on which the campaign was advertising.Update: Tongue in cheek, Prof. Reynolds writes that Chandler's win is "entirely because of the blogads!"
In other words, they got roughly a 50-fold turnaround on their investment in the final two weeks of the campaign. And in case you're wondering one hundred grand is a lot of money in a House race.
Now, obviously that's exciting news for proprietors of blogs looking to open up revenue streams from advertisers. But the bigger story here is about the Democrats and the Internet, and the way this technology seems to click, shall we say, for the Democratic demographic.
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Ad ricochets
Mike Haines is running in the Democratic primary in Georgia's 12th district. His campaign staff have bought some blogads to appeal to a national audience for funding. Clicking on a blogad on DailyKos, members of the massive and activist DailyKos community (aka Kossites) have arrived at the Haines blog to critique the ad, offer support and ask for the candidate's positions on a slew of issues. He's just responded. Haines' opponent in the race, John Barrow, has also bought a number of ads on blogs.
Not your grandma's media, is it?
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Deride and conquer
Welcome to Dean uber blogger Mathew Gross as he returns to private life with his own blog. Matt's blog will be a magnet for Internet activists, and his blogads are good value. Matt makes an interesting point:
And the amazing thing -- the thing I still have yet to see a single pundit get -- was that only 600,000 people in a nation of 300 million did that. 600,000 people shook the very foundation of political power in this country. It was an earthquake felt by both parties, the media, and the special interests. That feeling scared the hell out of a lot of people in Washington D.C. But you know what it felt like to the rest of us? It felt like hope.
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Chandler nets 20-fold return on blogads
Amy Keller of Roll Call did a great job earlier this week covering the Chandler campaign's use of blogads.
With an investment of only $2,000, and in less than two weeks, the campaign has raked in between $45,000 and $50,000 in contributions from blog readers, and that number is growing every day, said Chandler campaign manager Mark Nickolas.
Chandler — a former state auditor and former state attorney general — is facing off against GOP state Sen. Alice Forgy Kerr in the Feb. 17 special election for the Lexington-area House seat. But while Kerr has outraised Chandler by several hundred thousand dollars — as of late last week, Kerr had raised about $1.2 million and Chandler was estimating his fundraising total at about $650,000 — Chandler’s campaign says its fundraising pace is picking up and at least part of the surge has come from the Web.
“It has been phenomenal,” Nickolas said. “I get an e-mail every time there’s a contribution — and we know from the e-mail the source is a blog when they come through that avenue. Since the morning of Jan. 29, the FEC [filing] cut-off, I’ve put all those e-mails in a separate file. So far there are 711.”...
Nickolas said the contributions from blog readers are “averaging in the $40 to $50 range.” The vast number of contributions are between $20 and $25, but every so often a $1,000 or $2,000 contribution will pop up to “boost the average.”
While Nickolas was initially hoping simply to make back the campaign’s $2,000 investment, the gamble has brought in more than 20 times that amount.
Chandler’s experience seems to reinforce conclusions made by the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, which in a recent report stated that the “great promise of online fundraising lies in its low transaction costs,” enabling political fundraisers to “look to average people for funding.”
Indeed, as Chandler’s blog choices demonstrate, while the price of running a campaign ad on a blog varies greatly from one site to another, doing so is uncontestably cost-effective.
“You can get the premier spot for a lot of these blogs for just $400,” remarked Nickolas, who consulted with Blogads’ Henry Copeland for advice on where to place his ads.
According to the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet study, the “online political citizens” are “dramatically more likely than the general public to donate money to candidates,” and by the end of 2003, approximately 46 percent of that universe had already donated to a candidate or political organization in the past two to three months. By way of comparison, only 10 percent of the general population has donated to a candidate or political party during the same time period.
The study also found that Democrats tend to be more comfortable giving online, with nearly half of all Democrats — 49 percent — saying they donated online, compared to just 11 percent of Republican donors.
“The thing about this community is they are educated. They pay attention to politics. They care and they tend to have a little bit more disposable income,” Nickolas observed. “If you can appeal to them, they are more than happy to throw $20, $50 or $100 at you.” ...
Can Chandler’s success during this special election translate into a winning fundraising formula for other campaigns — particularly in a busy campaign season in which dozens upon dozens of candidates are competing for attention?
“There’s no doubt about it,” Nickolas said, though he conceded: “We’ve been blessed by the fact that we’re the only race out there.” He said the campaign’s finance director has been inundated with calls from other Democrats in the fundraising arena wanting to know if they can do this in their campaign.
Nickolas is sure of one thing, however: “We’ve probably raised the real estate prices on these blogs.”
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In the air
I'm flying from LA to Chapel Hill today. Look forward to answering a bunch of e-mail and voice-mail tomorrow AM!
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Goddard: Blogads are amazing!
Taegan Goddard writes "Blogads are amazing. An update from Chandler's campaign says they've raised more than $40,000 from their ad buy 10 days ago! The Chandler ad is in the left sidebar."
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A media pack(age) not a herd
Glenn Reynolds writes: "BLOGADS seem to work. Despite its taking-in-each-others'-wash overtones, I bought blogads on TalkLeft and BillHobbs.com for my wife's documentary, Six. The orders have poured in, and the ads, for a month and two weeks respectively, paid for themselves almost overnight. It's not choking the local post office or anything, but it's a pretty good response. Meanwhile, PoliticalWire reports that the Chandler for Congress blogad paid for itself in donations the first day. Maybe Henry's onto something."
As Glenn is wont to say: blogs are a pack, not a herd. Ignore them at your peril.
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On the road again
I'll be staying with Matt and Emmanuelle Saturday night in LA and then driving down to San Diego for the O'reilly e-democracy confab. This is late notice... but if you are a blogger in LA and want to come around for lunch Sunday, please drop me a line. Don't be shy, people.
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Image white-outs
We've had two ten-minute glitches in the last 24 hours with disappearing ad images. These outages have occured on both image servers we run at Interland, so it appears these outages are upstream from our servers.
Our serving strategy has been revised significantly in the last month. Now the ad management and javascript serving is handled by two servers at the most expensive host around, Rackspace, with the images being served from Interland, where bandwidth is cheaper.
This means that if outages occur, the adstrip framework and text will still load and the actual loading of all blog pages will not be degraded.
If anyone is interested in eliminating the risk of brief image outages, we'll gladly forward a CGI to cache ads on your server. It is simple to install and the cache updates only once a day
or when new ads are added. I know that as numbers grow, a number of bigger bloggers are reconsidering their hosting options, so if you have any tips please pass them along.
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Blair twitch project aims at Boston and NY
Australian Groucho Marxist and Karl Marx-basher Tim Blair announces he will be covering the Democratic and Republican conventions. Having attended the Democratic convention in LA in 2000 with Drs Layne and Welch, Blair pledges: "coverage in 2004 will be even more uncompromisinger and independented." Blair's one of the latest geniuses selling blogads.
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Bloggers to the barricades (again)
Dogged bloggers toppled Trent Lott and rained on Howell Raines. Are bloggers going to keep this story boiling too? As blogger Phil Carter, a former army reservist, writes about President Bush's army record:
if I were a reporter sitting in the White House press room, asking questions of Scott McClellan, I'd start asking about [Bush's] pay records, retirement records, and tax records from 1972. Even if the attendance records are gone -- there are still plenty of ways to document the President's service. It's entirely possible that these records exist, and that they will document the President's honorable service in the National Guard. But only the records can show that conclusively.
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Blogads at the Oscars
The folks at DigitalHit wrote me tonight. "We're going to be backstage blogging the Oscars for the sixth year in a row...hell, we were doing up-to-the-minute backstage reports even before we knew it was "blogging". ;-)"
Go buy an ad from them. Only $25 a week!
When, 93 minutes into the event, 200 million Americans Google "Renée Zellweger flashing" -- your ad will star!
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News flash
Blogs had a huge traffic surge Sunday night minutes after Janet Jackson's breast-baring. Traffic on Blogcritics went up 50-fold in minutes. As blogger Adrian Holvaty noted, it was impossible to get this news "flash" from traditional outlets:
...I saw it -- live. Er, I thought I saw it. I wasn't sure. The camera cut away so quickly that I couldn't really tell what'd happened. So I did what any self-respecting Internet-junkie would do: I flipped open my laptop and hit the Web. CNN had nothing. MSNBC had nothing. Neither did the New York Times, Washington Post or Chicago Tribune. Google News didn't say anything about it, either. I checked a bunch of other big-media sites but couldn't find any coverage. [Via Jeff Jarvis]In part, this was a question of those outlets decency standards. They couldn't show the actual event.
But, as we sort through the logs and aftermath, it appears that much of this traffic was, actually, driven through search engines. Search engine Lycos reports
Prior to this week, the most-searched event in the history of the Lycos 50 over a one-day period was the September 11 attack on America. Although it is very difficult to compare searches for the two events, it looks like the Super Bowl halftime show was the equal of September 11 when it comes to Internet attention. That is, to put it bluntly, mind-blowing.I'd say this trend doesn't say so much about American interest in the two events as about American consumption of news in the 25 months since September 2001. Here's my post about how September 11 turned me into a rabid blog reader.
Why is it difficult to compare? The Super Bowl halftime show was a single event. Searches revolved almost entirely around two phrases, either Super Bowl halftime or Janet Jackson. Everybody knew exactly what they were looking for.
On September 11, however, nobody really knew what they were looking for. Confusion about what had happened, not to mention multiple attacks, caused Lycos users to search for a huge number of different terms, from the places attacked (World Trade Center, Pentagon, New York City) to those attacking us (Osama bin Laden, Taliban) to a hoax about a prediction of the attack (Nostradamus).
Now, when you add all those different terms together, you get less than half as many search requests as we received on Monday for Janet Jackson and the Super Bowl halftime show. However, you also have to consider the massive rise in searches for terms like breaking news and latest news on September 11, and searches for news organizations from CNN to FOX.
There was no similar rise in searches for news organizations on Monday, with one exception: The Drudge Report, which posted pictures of the exposed breast, received 30 times the searches it gets on a normal day.
Add the increase in news searches on September 11 to all the specific searches for September 11-related topics, and the total is roughly equivalent to the number of searches for Janet Jackson and the halftime show. Still, the fact that a single breast received as much attention as the first attack on United States soil in 60 years is beyond belief.
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Study: publishers should sell print subscriptions online with credit cards
WSJ reports newspapers who sell print subscriptions online do better:
"The cost of acquiring a subscriber historically has been lowest in telemarketing, but that doesn't factor in how long you keep the subscriber," said John Murray, vice president of circulation at the Newspaper Association of America. According to an NAA study, new subscriptions generated through telemarketing have a retention rate of 28% after one year, the weakest result of all marketing tools.
But when a subscriber signs up over the Internet, the retention rate after one year jumps to 51%. Direct-mail and carrier solicitations, meanwhile, retain customers at a rate of 50% and 53%, respectively, after a year. Those who sign up unsolicited, known as "voluntary" subscribers, have a 60% retention rate.
The most effective way to hang on to subscribers is by offering so-called easy-pay programs, in which subscribers are automatically billed on their debit or credit cards. Those programs have retention rates of 85% and 79%, respectively, the NAA study found.
Despite those high rates, industrywide less than 5% of newspaper subscribers pay by credit card. "The low usage of easy-pay appears to be attributable to a lack of promotion," said Fred Searby, newspaper analyst at J.P. Morgan, in a research report.
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Dean blog copied in f'urn countries
Doug Arellanes reports from Prague that Czech "fugitive financier and EU parliamentary candidate Viktor Kožený's website design was stolen lock, stock and barrel from US Presidential candidate Howard Dean."
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Put your right foot in...
Ever the athlete, my friend Rick Bruner tackles a new challenge.
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Advertise on Instapundit
Steve Outing gets credit for scooping everyone but Glenn Reynolds by reporting that Instapundit is now selling blogads.
The story now isn't old media versus new, print versus pixels, journalists versus bloggers, broadcast versus network... it's corporate media versus the corpuscles.
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Okrent: All the news that's fit to print... or just NYT news?
A cutting self-analysis by Dan Okrent in today's NYT, highlighting three recent stories that the Times missed. missed. "In the last several weeks, three stories launched elsewhere have been either diminished or disregarded by The Times. (Of course, among major news organizations, this not-invented-here attitude is no more exclusive to The Times than are commas.) In each case, the effort to maintain a high level of what people around here call 'competitive metabolism' has not served the readers well."
1) "Last October, The Blade in Toledo, Ohio, published a series of articles revealing that 'members of a platoon of American soldiers known as Tiger Force slaughtered an untold number of Vietnamese civilians over a seven-month period in 1967.' The series was the product of 10 months of research conducted on two continents and in seven states." The Times ignored the story until December 28. Executive Editor Bill Keller, writes Okrent, "told me that if his own staff had developed the Blade series, he would have put it on the front page. Yet at least partly because it was someone else's, it ended up diminished, delayed and, in some eyes, devalued."
2) The Times didn't have access to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, when his book blasting the Bush administration was released. "For the historical record provided by the newspaper of record, explosive revelations about a sitting president by one of his appointees were consigned to Pages A11, A22 and A13."
3) Finally, the Times failed to report a nuanced and powerful report about Iraqi arms in the Washington Post. Checking the facts would have been too hard, rationalizes the NYT, says Okrent. The Times excuses itself by saying it doesn't rehash other people's stories. "But it's not as if The Times, and every other newspaper on the planet, doesn't consistently publish material it hasn't gathered on its own. When a district attorney announces an indictment, The Times doesn't assume it needs weeks to interview witnesses, check allegations or otherwise vet the prosecutor's charges. When a politician makes a speech, there's often so much taken at face value a critic could argue (and in my e-mail, many, many do) that the paper is shilling for the politician. Having read Barton Gellman's words for many years, why can't Times editors have as much faith in them as in John Kerry's, or Dick Cheney's, or the Santa Barbara County prosecutor's? They - the editors - may read The Washington Post. But how many of their readers do?"
"I understand why competition is necessary to inspire the troops. I also understand that Macy's never carried anything with a Gimbel's label sewn into it. But maybe The Times's insistence on stamping its own brand on everything it touches ends up diminishing what it delivers. If the goal of newspapering is to inform the readers and create a historical record, shouldn't the editors be telling us about everything they think is important, no mater where they find it?"
Okrent sure sounds like a blogger.
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