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Archives: October 2004
Blog advertising in Newsday...
Great lede about blog advertising: "The odds of making a living by writing a blog are a lot like the odds of a garage band turning out a hit album: It can happen, but you better enjoy the music and hang on to your day job in the meantime." Lou Dilanar goes on give a complete run-down on blogads in Newsday today.
Some very kind words about us: "the economics of blogging have shifted rapidly, thanks to a simple but brilliant idea called Blogads, which allows bloggers to outsource the equivalent of a newspaper's business and advertising departments, and focus solely on writing. You report! You decide! Blogads sends check!"
And more blog demonizing in the NYT: "If the Internet has been the source of vicious blogs and half-baked rumors, it has also often been a worthy watchdog on the mainstream media, a direct route to the candidates' records and official Web sites and a means of instantly checking their half-truths and evasions through nonpartisan outlets like FactCheck.org at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Center."
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Ad propagation problems
We added six new servers last week getting ready for next week's traffic, which I assume will at least double anything we've seen previously. Unfortunately, our mechanism for refreshing ads on these various servers did not scale up. Until we can rejig the ad propagation routine, ad updating may be delayed by minutes or hours. I apologize for the shortfall. Feel free to give advice or complain in comments below, or e-mail info@ with questions.
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Us and them
My buddy Jeff Jarvis highlights an underlying theme between two articles in yesterday's NYT.
The first examined the rising tide of blogging about your cat on a Friday, practiced by everyone from Instapundit to Atrios. As Jeff puts it, "makes us look like a bunch of frothing nutjobs. It is essentially condescending and insulting."
Then Jeff digs into a second "news article" that chronicles and bemoans recent blogger vitriole towards journalists.
The article highlights crude insults bloggers and their readers have tossed at journalists. As Jeff puts it, the article "paints us as more of an angry mob than a sensible bunch of people who happen to be citizens and voters and newspaper readers. By making us look so angry, it marginalizes us as cultish."
Sure there are nutty bloggers and blog readers, and it is worth examining their excesses. But where's that wonderful journalistic impulse towards balance? What about the good things bloggers do? Nahhh. The essential irony is that an article aimed at proving that bloggers wrongly (and inhumanely) accuse the press as being biased against the left or the right proves itself to be nakedly partisan against bloggers. It repeatedly quotes the worst excesses of the blogosphere, without examining the amazing contributions bloggers are making to the public discourse. Consider the idiocies nailed by the blogosphere in the last two years: Trent Lott (a closet racist), Howell Raines (an arrogant twit), CBS (quick to write, slow to right)... the list grows monthly.
What is the other side? As Jeff puts it, "Perhaps it's that big media is messing up and has had no check for too long. Perhaps it's that once-passive readers now have their own press and have something to say and it's time for you to listen. Perhaps if you try hard to open your eyes and read your own story again, you might smell a bias here -- against the public you supposedly serve."
Jeff, it is not just that "big media is messing up." It is that top-down command structures are inherently fragile and weak when compared with networked swarms. Put another way, 100,000 minds networked in real time and positioned across America's geographic and psychic landscape see and understand lots of things that the ten editors sitting atop rigid periodical news machines in NY and DC do not and can not.
The game has changed. I've been a journalist. Some of my best friends are journalists. Some of the smartest, most humane people I know are journalists. But I also know that monopolies corrupt and that enough journalists have been corrupted by complacency to turn into pompous, entitled hacks. If the hacks want war, war it shall be.
The bottom line -- if we are moving from the past year's "Look! Non-journalists with websites! Aren't they CUTE!" attitude to a new story line of "bloggers call us names and don't play fair," the revolution is nearly over. The royalty in the castle's highest tower can smell the smoke.
My bet is that we'll see bloggers on the left and right unite around some issue in the next six months, and the unity will be provoked by some attack on a blogger's rights.
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Mary: the meek shall inherit the earth
Mary Meeker, the Marie Antoinette of the pre-2001 Ancien Regime, lauds blogs: "if there are hundreds or thousands of thought leaders and motivated, interested parties on the Internet with the ability to publish news or insights into any number of local or global issues, then it is safe to say that these blogs often become both the first source of news, a vital proving ground for authors and a source of potential community for other interested parties. For example, you’re probably going to get far more Boston Red Sox specific-content from a blog about the Red Sox made by a die-hard fan than you will from a random sports page, especially if you’re after opinions and community."
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Eminem on blogs
Blogads aficionados (yes, you Mom) may have noticed this eye-zapping image put out on blogs tonight promoting Eminem's Mosh.
Here's Ken Layne's take.
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WPost readers love blogs
WPost names "Politics & Elections Readers' Choice Awards," 3/4 of whom sell blogads, here. Congratulations to JesusGeneral, Atrios, Instapundit, Talkingpointsmemo, LGF, DailyKos, AndrewSullivan, InDCjournal and Wonkette.
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Blogger brains...
"In terms of formal education, many bloggers surpass journalists." Look at this page: Markos Moulitsas is a lawyer/activist, Glenn Reynolds is a law professor, Duncan Black is an economics Phd, Josh Marshall has a Phd in American history, Andrew Sullivan has a Phd in political science, the RealClearPolitics guys are former commodity traders, Charles Johnson is an entrepreneur... basically everyone on the list has a field of expertise BEYOND their blogging passion.
Funnily enough, most articles about the blogging revolution fail to mention this fact.
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Misc
Roundup of blog reviews of Team America.
Excellent blog journalism moves elections in... Budapest.
We went to the state fair yesterday, losing at the ball toss, winning with squirt guns. Lots of pellet shooting at the free stand run by the state wildlife agency. I was surprised to see that Kerry stickers outnumbered Bush stickers 3 to 1.
Ken Layne pulls together lots of ugly peak oil data. Travel like this will one day seem as remote as the days when millions of buffalo roamed the American west.
How can Business Week feature Matt Haughey's throughout this article but mispell his name?
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Political weblogs unread?
CBSMarketwatch's Frank Barnako declares that "almost noone reads" political blogs. Scott Allen points out that Daily Kos, doing nothing but Democratic politics, is within traffic spitting distance of the WashingtonPost, which covers dozens of topics.
Frank, who has an undeclared blog fetish, back-tacks with the thought that the blog audiences must be high quality and ecstatically niche. (Thank you Olivier.) www.jeffjarvis.com notes Barnako misses the "influencers" angle.
Yes to niche and influencers, but if I were an editor looking for the cutting edge (or to revisit a theme declared dead in 2001), I'd sick a reporter on this idea -- how can a couple of dozen bloggers reach the same traffic scale, roughly, as the New York Times, which has 1100 editorial employees? What does THAT mean for the future of publishing?
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Electoral vote
I don't know about you, but I'm riveted to Electoral-vote.com. He (or she?) is looking for donations to help get the word out. Hey editors, this guy is doing a fantastic job with his service AND doing huge traffic -- a good story?
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Online sales
Online Retail Sales
Revenue generated from online retail sites between Thanksgiving and Christmas
YEAR SALES
1999 $5.0 billion
2000 $10.0 billion
2001 $8.3 billion
2002 $8.4 billion
2003 $11.0 billion
2004 $13.2 billion* (Forrester)
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Paypal brownouts...
An update on Paypal's problems, which I believe have impacted a few Blogads buyers.
The outages are regrettable and we can all gripe, but in the big picture Paypal is still a miraculous service that has ennabled tens of billions of dollars of e-commerce transactions for small online players (like us!)
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TV pundit shut out pumps traffic and a little money to blogs
It happens every four years. Presidential contenders verbally joust on primetime television and the networks airing 90 minutes of uninterrupted coverage lose tens of millions of dollars in advertising.Funnily enough, the debates are a huge boon for blogs. TV pundits have to shut up for 90 minutes and bloggers are the only game in town, virtual monopolists. We haven't necessarily picked up that $50 million in revenue, but are working on it.
This time around, independent research analyst Jack Myers estimated that the four top networks -- CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox -- are collectively losing anywhere from $40 million to $50 million on each debate.
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Animated ads bad, part 23
Steve Outing, critiquing animated ads: "As we observed in Eyetrack when we looked at website banner advertising, the typical amount of time that people spend looking at an ad is usually less than a second -- when it's viewed at all. It varies based on ad content, size, and placement, but even the biggest ads only got a second and a half of viewing time in our study."
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Nice ad...
Normally, I'm not a big fan of animated ads, most of which scream out -- "I'm an ad, don't click me." However, this ad for Cable-safe gets my attention and sells me. A great a ad (like a smart essay) shows rather than tells.
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Me to be on TV: totally vapid
In theory, I'll be CNBC's Bullseye tonight at 6.45, piped in from their Raleigh affiliate. I'll be driving over there in a few minutes.
Those of you who know how much I love TV will get a chuckle out of this. But Thank YOU to CNBC for giving blog advertising more publicity!
(TV star and blogger Jeff Jarvis advises me not to wear a checked or white shirt.)
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Sexy blogads
Daily News media columnist Paul Colford knows a hot thing when he sees it: sex, politics and Blogads. He dug out something I didn't know: "TBS plans to revisit the blogs with ads for 'The Real Gilligan's Island,' its new reality show, and 'Too Funny to Sleep,' its late-night comedy block."
Meanwhile, the Pew folks concludes that "The campaigns have spent more than $100 on television ads for every dollar they have spent on web ads." That's a lotta upside baby.
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Debate scoring
Debate count:
-- hope: Bush 16, Kerry 0.
-- Osama: Bush 4, Kerry 9.
-- families: Bush 0, Kerry 3.
-- Iraq: Bush 52, Kerry 36.
-- hard work: Bush 11, Kerry 0.
-- government: Bush 4, Kerry 0.
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Reno and Tahoe
Hanging out with Ken Layne and Marc Brown Thursday night in Reno. A classic conversation ranging across the foothills and peaks of fantasy and pragmatism: Priory of Sion factoids, candidate debates, German pointers, Hunter's rattler certificate and resurrection, neighbors, VC, incestuous investors, "hip" versus profitable technology, parenthood. Met the lovely Laura, who is due in February. Learned that Charlie and Bonnie also expecing. Marc shot me, mid-night.
(Noticed that CNN now has "blogs" by Novak and Begala. Although they've got the reverse chronology, no post-URLs, no links to outside opinion or material, no real personality.)
Friday we drove up the mind-bending Harrah's casino for Gnomedex. The event was fantastic, but the casino experience soul-shuddering. The weirdness is best summed up by Marc's fantastic photoblog. Here are the two archive pages: 1 and 2. I met Wil Wheaton, writer, former Trekie and a happy blogad seller. I heard Steve Wozniak tell about the time in High School he put a fake bomb in his buddy's locker. He got called to the principals office and found himself surrounded by the chief of police, the principal, the vice principal, etc. The principal explained how he'd taken the "bomb" out of the locker and run to the football field to dismantle it. Hearing this, woz started laughing: he'd set the bomb to tick faster when the locker door opened.
Here's Ken's account of the weekend: 1, 2, 3, 4, and finally, Ken's captioning Marc's photos.
I'd like to call special attention to the couple who got married while attending Gnomedex. Of all the things I saw that weekend -- flaming Microsoft-blog toys, flashing Google-lights, 5AM slots players, jazz statues, glowing Google cups, 45-year-old geeks leaping for t-shirts, staggering bachlorette parties, packs of gambling families, elderly cocktail waitresses, a Google staffer who thinks his employer is still in the search engine business, freaky dolls -- this was the most disconcerting.
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