I noticed that the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz quoted verbatim my earlier blogads post, including the argument that “Buying 5 million page impressions on blogs costs less than $3000. The same ads on WashingtonPost.com or NYTimes.com would cost $125,000+ . . . which would you buy?” Thank you for mentioning blogads, Howard, and sorry that WP ad rep slashed your tire.

(Kurtz closes: “But could candidates lose votes over annoying pop-ups?” Anyone who has his e-mail address (I can’t find it online) might drop a line clarifying that Blogads are not popups.)

LA journalist and Reason editor Matt Welch got an ad from John Kerry over the weekend. While and [url=]Josh Marshall used the occassion of their first candidate ads to
discuss the merits of taking such ads, Matt dives right into critiquing Kerry.

Matt gives Kerry bonus points for enabling comments on his site, but quibbles with Kerry’s “interventionist approach to the economy.” He continues, “my choice for 2004 will almost surely be based entirely on foreign policy concerns (though free trade, to me, is near the top of my foreign policy agenda). So if I have time, we’ll discuss that next.”

What does Kerry get out of advertising on blogs that he doesn’t get from advertising in other media?

a) Cost-effective clicks. Remember bloggers have no overheads and haven’t priced their rate cards to fund executive jacuzzis. Buying 5 million page impressions on blogs costs < $3000, while the same quantity of impressions costs $90,000-$150,000 on TNR, NYTimes.com and Washingtonpost.com.

b) Attention from folks who actually care about politics. As of 8AM Sunday EST, Matt’s post has 10 comments. While many are flip, the comments indicate engagement and slide towards serious debate. Matt responds to one by saying “it strikes me at minimum as peculiar that certain supporters of the war-dodger-in-chief keep banging away at Kerry for talking up his military service. ” Compare this engagement with the impact of a typical television ad which often emerges while no one is in the room (remember half of America has the television on nonstop), then disappears into the ether, next to be heard by some Klingon spies 175 light years from earth.

You can see Kerry ads on Soundbitten,Matt Welch, NYCeats, Amy Langfield, Atrios, Political Wire, Talkingpointsmemo, and Blogshares… with more to come!

By the way, if you click the “more” link, you’ll see a great article done about Blogads by marketing guru Ken Magill in the NYSun. (more…)

Atrios is currently running 13 blogads, a record for him and us.

I hope we see lots more of this. Ads are fun. More ads are better — they start to talk to each other and play off each other. They constitute a marketplace of messages. Nobody would visit Times Square if it had only one billboard and nobody would want to advertise there either.

Why don’t traditional publishers adopt the same bountiful strategy? I think the limited advertising slots on corporate media sites (banner on top, a couple buttons on the side) are a vestige of the portal mentality. And the false scarcity that portal mentality provokes is — surprise — a good way to prop prices up so print rate cards aren’t undercut.

Bloggers with lots of space and low overheads can take a more market-friendly approach.

Considers the winners:

— Lower prices and more ads means individual entrepreneurs or ideologues can afford to advertise.
— The reader can skim, compare and contrast and find the stuff that’s relevant.
— Running lots of ads at once gives the blogger a higher effective CPM than some big media manage.

Everyone wins — except traditional publishers.

Update November 6: The joys of supply and demand. Atrios has raised prices. The link to his order page says “Temporarily Not Taking New Ads (unless you really want to pay the temporarily obscene prices)” … and a one month ad (temporarily) costs $3000.

Ads for John Kerry’s presidential campaign are running on four sites this AM.

For you news junkies, this is groundbreaking. Blogs are extraordinarily cheap AND influential, and it is great that a national campaign has caught on to advertising on the blogging medium.

There are also some important philosophical ground to plow. Josh Marshall sketches a policy for accepting ads from campaigns he covers.

Atrios’ post on advertising provokes a vigorous debate in his comments section. “Advertising is evil,” writes one reader. Another says, “Don’t apologize, don’t wring your hands, don’t look back. You need to exist, and it costs money.”

The bottom line: bloggers have the lowest overheads in media and the most passionate audiences. Buying 5 million page impressions on blogs costs less than $3000. The same ads on WashingtonPost.com or NYTimes.com would cost $125,000+… which would you buy?

I’m blogging from Ad-tech. If you are here and want to rendezvous, leave a comment or call me on 617 395 0176 or drop by the press room in the Gibson suite on the 2nd floor.

I met Joi Ito briefly at Bloggercon. He more than lives up to his reputation — he’s smart, charming, impassioned and humble.

He visits Disney Tokyo with his daughter: “When we encountered crowds I realized that my behavior was a bit different than most of the people, but obviously not unique. I would avoid crowds and try to go in the opposite direction of crowds. If I noticed I was near the front of a crowd or ahead of a crowd, I would accelerate and try to stay ahead. Otherwise I would change course or go the other direction. If there were lines, I would choose the shortest one. I saw some people doing exactly the opposite. Even though there were ticket windows open, they would go to where people were lined up. If there was a crowd, it often attracted more people. Even if people were ahead of the pack, they walked slowly and were engulfed by the crowd.”

He defends journalists: “I think we should stop picking on professional traditional journalists. I think that if journalists need help from their editors to write, (in the case of Japan) want life-time employment, need someone to protect them in court, need paper boys to reach their readers and need a brand to provide legitimacy, I think they should be allowed to do this. I think it’s mean to pick on them too much…”

Doug Arellanes gives a 45 second overview of Prague’s touristic pleasures. .

A new study by the Kaiser Foundation finds that 65% of children live in homes where television is on half the time or more. 43% of four to six-year-olds have a set in their bed room. 36% live in a home where the television is always or nearly always on — and these tots are about half as likely to know how to read. (Of course, I couldn’t read until I was seven and got to watch nothing but Wild Kingdom and Disney once a week on an ancient wood-paneled television that stood on four legs.) (PDF summary of study.)

Ad Age reports on the higher standards being set by advertisers and the indignant response of publishers. “We are in business, in part, to serve the media buyers,” said Thomas O. Ryder, chairman-CEO of Reader’s Digest Association and newly elected chairman of Magazine Publishers of America. “But there is a point at which this becomes silly and counterproductive, and we are rapidly approaching that point.” (Marketingwonk.)

The server where adstrips are cached is down right now. I’m not sure why and am trying to get the issue resolved.

If you are a blogger, for now the best solution is to take your adstrip javascript down. We’ll credit advertisers for the outage. For the future, the best solution is to use our blogger-side adstrip caching scripts, which we are happy to walk you through setting up.

I’m sorry about the problem and look forward to having it resolved in coming hours. (Update: as of 8.15, we are live again. Sorry for the trouble. More tomorrow.)