blogads for the opinion makers

Arianna Huffington writes: “The blogosphere is now the most vital news source in our country. I’ve toiled in the world of books and syndicated column writing, but more liberating is the blogosphere, where the random thought is honored, and where passion reigns. While paid journalists often just follow a candidate around or sit in the White House press room and rehash a schedule, blogs break through the din of our 500 channel universe and the narrow conventional wisdom. For that the blogosphere has my undying gratitude.”

Charles Kuffner has some answers from campaign staffers.

Meanwhile, the pilot fish of political blogads — the t-shirt seller — is still thriving. I got this message the other day from Stephen Bach, who is selling piles of Dude, where’s my weapons? T-shirts thanks to his blogad on Talkingpointsmemo: “The response has been incredible! P.S. I Googled ‘Dude Where’s My Weapons’ and found my t-shirt picture on two other political blogs, WITH a link to my site. Viral marketing is a wonderful thing!”

BTW, for all you folks who think that bigger is better in web-design — the simple landing page for Stephen’s ad (the page you see after you click) is a great example of how to do things right:

– we get punched in the face with Stephen’s offer: 90% of the visual communication is about his product.

– an unadorned design keeps the visitor focused on doing just one thing: acting. Think of the landing page as a bull’s eye that has just one logical outcome, not as a supermarket that promotes 57 distractions.

– the page should look neat and professional, but not too nice. An occassional rough edge emphasizes the human beings behind the HTML and lets customers know that their money is being spent on better products and not cutting edge web design.

A bullseye landing page can make the difference between just recouping your ad spend and making a five or ten-fold return.

Dealing with various blog advertiers, I’ve seen that these lessons apply whether you are selling t-shirts, fund raising for candidates or enlisting partisans for a cause.

Of course, some very fancy designs can work well too, but the risk/reward definitely suggests that money spent on design frills won’t increase your returns.

To put it another way, if you’ve got $4000 to spend on “blog advertising,” you should spend $500 on designing five good ad images, $600 writing good copy for the landing page, $100 designing a landing page and $2700 on ad space on blogs. (You can save on the landing page copy by cannibalizing some of your direct mail copy.)

Update: Later in the day, I called up Bach. Turns out he’s been doing marketing for 20 years. Rather than beginner’s luck, his brutally simple landing page is a tested and refined customer catcher.

Strange things happen when people are the media.

Amy Langfield stands in line on Times Square for theater tix and makes a weird weird electronic connection with a college friend in LA. Imagine what happens when you combine Orkut with GPS.

“Secret” advertising on blogs? — Kos comments. Here’s a random $75 response.

Jeff Jarvis is leading a session on “the business of blogging” at the Harvard Bloggercon symposium this year.

My own view is that there’s going to be little “business of blogging” other than the flow of revenues to individuals and small groups of writers selling advertisers access their audiences. And, obviously, I believe the Blogads network — some of America’s smartest writers allied together — is helping make that happen.

I’ve been raving about blog advertising for nearly two years. I’m glad the Harvard poohbahs will finally get to hear about it.

Rick Bruner, who spells as bad as me, is rewarding readers who highlight his mistakes. Yes, yet another slash in the ongoing drawing and quartering of corporate media. “This may seem like a self-effacing bid for greater accountability, but in fact it’s a shameless attempt to build community, get some comments and compel people to actually read my posts closely,” writes Rick. Go pick some of Rick’s nits.

Taegan Goddard, proprieter of PoliticalWire has just launched an aggregator, updating hourly, pulling together headlines from blogs on the left and right.

Sometimes I see a blogad that blows me away. Only on blogs, I think. This is one of them:

“The legendary store Science Fiction, Mysteries, and More in lower Manhattan closed 3 years ago, and after being unable to find a new location, decided to liquidate everything. Over 4000 new paperbacks, available individually or in lots, all must go; this lot ends 4/15!”

The ad is running on the blogs of a pair of science fiction editors, a wife and husband team.

Author Virginia Postrel is selling blogads… go buy from her. Also, an inside tip: the traffic numbers for TAPPed don’t yet register the site’s full traffic, so the one week ads are underpriced. Buy an ad fast if you like good deals.

An overview of political blogads in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. (Userid/pw: blogads.) The lead is a fun one: “Who wouldn’t love this kind of payoff? Invest $2,000 in an obscure concept that has no track record and watch $80,000 pour into your bank account in a mere three weeks. Bonus: The money helps win you a congressional seat.”

“An obscure concept that has no track record”… hmm, I wonder if we should trademark that?

Friday, I spent an amazing day at George Washington University’s internet and politics conference.

The highpoint was the final debate: is the Internet best used as a tool for control and organization or as a tool for individuals to express their automony and/or self-organize? Zack Exley of Moveon.org and Phil Hendon of RightMarch.com spoke pro-control against David Weinberger and Markos Moulitas laid out the case that the web’s anarchic or self-organizing principles are more powerful.

Although Prof. Weinberger pounded the table and shouted at the gathered 300 consultants and poohbahs, “I am not a consumer of your political products, I am a citizen!” the general debate was alarmingly civil; both camps ended up saying “we agree with the other guys, the web is about top-down organization and self-organization.”

To hell with moderation! To round out the dialectical dance, I argued that the either control or self-organization will win; either we’ll have politics a la Microsoft or open source.

Why? The dominant model will achieve network effects and squeeze the second model out. Which is to say: the model that has the most participants and delivers the maximum benefit to those participants will, ta-da!, attract the most participants. And if it will be either/or, the open source model will win.

The session on advertising focused purely on ad units, I guess because this is the currency of exchange that advertisers purchase from publishers. But this agency-and-publisher-centric view misses a key point: an effective message must be composed of an ad unit AND the landing page. Either piece alone fails or underperforms.

One participant asked: what’s the standard unit of political advertising — the banner, the sky-scraper, the popup? Good question. If you measure in terms not of dollars spent but of total number of candidates and causes, the standard unit of political advertising in this election cycle is the blogad: 150X 200 pixels & 300 characters of text. Anyone want to prove me wrong?

Two final points:

Welcome to The American Prospect Magazine, the latest magazine selling blogads. As a fellow journalist used to say as a deadline loomed: three is a trend.

And welcome also to Roadrunner, which, as blogger Bill Hobbs notes, is the first major corporation to advertise on blogs.

Washington Monthly magazine is now selling blogads. Two highly regarded magazines (see post two down) have now signed onto the blogads network, which is nice testimony to the collective power of the blogosphere, not only as a traffic spinner, but as a commercial engine.

I’m in DC for a couple of days meeting people and so mostly offline. If you have something urgent to communicate, be sure to cc info at blogads.com.

I took the train up today and enjoyed napping and re-reading my much annotated copy of The Loyalty Effect. When I’m really into a book, I do a lot of writing in the margins. The first time I read TLE, we were ramping up Pressflex, our webmaster service for European publishers, so it is fun to see our pre-occupations reflected in my old marginal scribblings.

The lessons of the book: a) find and keep smart customers b) hire and retain great staff c) sell shares only to patient and passionate investors, who want you to do (a) and (b) 24/7 through thick and thin.

Bottom line: I’m very glad we never sold shares to VC. Blogads wouldn’t be here today if we had somebody breathing down our neck demanding 35% annualized returns on $5 million. You can do a lot of customers a lot of good without hitting those kind of numbers; in fact, it is far easier to serve people well and grow intelligently if you don’t aspire to those kind of returns.

Speaking of European journalism, I’m very happy Matt introduced me to the FleetStreetBlog.

Want to be an early adopter? Go buy blogads on Roger Simon’s blog and Reason magazine’s Hit & Run blog.

Read this blog entry and then this one. Or reverse the order if you aren’t feeling brave tonight.

A nice article about blogads in the Wall Street Journal this morning. My favorite quote comes from Markos Moulitsas Zuniga: “I even get some money over to the college fund for my baby.” Here are some excerpts:

Blogs Grow Up:
Ads on the Sites
Are Taking Off

…
The Chandler campaign is evidence of the latest step in the evolution of the Internet. Blogs, once derided as solipsistic exercises by self-important nobodies, are starting to go commercial as their readership grows.

The trend is in its early stages; big advertisers like Coke and Procter & Gamble aren’t yet hawking their wares on blogs. Indeed, much of the advertising is found on politically oriented blogs, which are experiencing a spike in readership from the presidential election. Many people wonder if the blog ad boomlet will outlast the election.

But other Internet institutions have had similarly modest origins; recall that eBay started out as a place to trade Beanie Babies and Pez dispensers. And it’s no surprise that as blogs grow in popularity, they are beginning to attract advertisers. Indeed, the entire Internet has been experiencing an uptick in ad revenue, with advertisers beginning to open their wallets again for the first time since the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000.

Typical of the new breed of “bloggerpreneurs” is Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who runs Daily Kos, a liberal political blog. Mr. Moulitsas says he initially wanted to keep his blog ad-free, as a way of preserving his independence.

But in December, he had to buy new server computers to keep up with growing traffic, and he started taking ads to pay the bills. Business was so good that in three months he was able to double his ad rates. Now, he’s bringing in $4,000 a month.

“That is phenomenal to me. I even get some money over to the college fund for my baby,” says Mr. Moulitsas.

…

Still, blog ads are in their infancy and the operators of these sites face big hurdles in luring more of them, ad experts say. “Over 90% of the business of Internet ads [goes to] 20 large, established news media like nytimes.com and WSJ.com. Honestly, the blogs haven’t hit the radar yet,” says Stu Ginsberg, public-relations director at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group for Web sites that take ads.

Yet the blog ad trend is far enough along that at least one company has sprung up to serve the market: Pressflex LCC. The Chapel Hill, N.C., company’s Blogads service connects advertisers with a network of bloggers, charging 20% for its efforts. So far, it says it has placed ads on about 200 blogs.

“They said nobody would want to advertise on personal diaries. Even my wife thought I was crazy,” recalls Henry Copeland, who founded the company in 2002. Now, he has three programmers working for him in Hungary.

…

Still, only the top blogs can snare ads from mainstream companies. Most others have to content themselves with ads from candidates, with conservatives typically advertising on conservative blogs, and likewise for liberals.

Other blog ads are for somewhat quirky products, such as a CD with humorous Christmas songs sold by Paul Libman, a Chicago composer. It’s an effective medium, Mr. Libman maintains; thanks to $450 in blog ads he sold 1,000 CDs during the holidays, twice as many as earlier seasons.

“I don’t think that the bloggers realized how much these ads are worth,” he says. “Next year it will be much more expensive.”

Indeed, the topic of blog ads, and how much they are worth, has become a theme in the discussions that bloggers have about their work on their own blogs.

…

James Wolcott in April’s Vanity Fair:

“Don’t dismiss blogs as the online rantings of B-list writers. Interlinked and meritocratic, seething with fierce debate and rivalries, they’re the best thing to hit journalism since the rise of the political pamphlet.”

Thank you to Jeff Jarvis for excerpting so much of the article.

UK publishing consultant Ian Jindal writes:

Recent estimates put the number of weblogs at between 1.5 and 3 million, excluding simple diaries or home pages. It’s also clear that there’s a power-law relationship in operation where the top few hundred blogs are attracting very serious levels of traffic.

Where, then, does this leave online publishers, especially those who publish news and analysis titles? What impact does this outpouring of information and opinion have upon our businesses? Other than publishers who have created unassailable positions through the creation of unique, necessary and clearly valuable content (eg Reuters, Bloomberg or news agencies), the majority of publishers fall into the ‘nice to have’ or ‘interest-based’ sectors rather than the ‘need to have’. Revenue models depend upon subscription, syndication and advertising, but with increasing amount of relevant, current content available free of charge, subscriptions and syndication opportunities are under pressure. Equally, with advertising following traffic volume and ‘what’s cool’ at a given time then advertising is also moving to Blogs. Henry Copeland’s Blogads approach should cause concern for publishers to the youth or strategic business market (http://www.blogads.com - the introduction is pithy and convincing).

Publishers would assert that in a time of mass ‘push’ of info that their imprimatur communicates quality assurance; that they invest in research and origination and that their reputation adds weight to their comments. This is patently of limited commercial comfort. Some of the bloggers are experts in their fields and do not need to be interpreted or validated by a ‘title’. Equally, journalists’ own blogs are often researched to the same standards as the titles for which they write - and challenges to their views and corrections or updates are much more readily and clearly made. Finally, many of the blogging systems are as sophisticated as expensive CMS offerings of but a couple of years ago. The online publishing standard has never been higher, nor more broadly available.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution covers the use of blogads by two competing primary candidates in Georgia.

One of the candidates, Doug Haines has answered a number of questions in his blog’s comments section. A DailyKos visitor to that blog said, “you’re really raising the bar for all the candidates seeking support from the blogosphere. Great work.”

I’ve previously argued with Ed Cone about whether it is too early for blogging to play a role in local races. But watching the Haines blog, I detect the kindling of a bonfire.

If you know of other articles about blog advertising, drop me a line at henry at blogads.com.

My buddy Steve in Amherst is busy milking gallons of sap a day from his maple. Unfortunately, he let one batch cook too long.

Reflecting on the recent loss of one of his star employees, Nick Denton writes:

For those of you who doesn’t follow every navel-gazing twist and turn of the blog world, Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc., a rival, poached one of Gawker Media’s writers, Pete Rojas of Gizmodo.

Sure, we recovered quickly. Joel Johnson, who was going to write another upcoming site, stepped in. And traffic has rebounded, though those readers may simply be enthralled by the spectacle of an online car crash happening in real time.

But the fact remains that I was caught unawares. I was in Brazil, my mind on other things. Before Pete gave his notice, he and Calacanis already had a slick copycat site — Engadget — ready to go. The shafting will be complete, today, with an artfully-placed item in New York Magazine, in which Calacanis boasts of his plans for 500 blogs. Round One to Calacanis. On to Round Two.

Is there any broader meaning to all this? Well, I have just one tentative conclusion. Blogs are likely to be better for readers than for capitalists. While I love the medium, I’ve always been skeptical about the value of blogs as businesses.

Nick artfully ignores the fact that “capitalist” and “corporate owner” are not synonomous.

Indeed, the solo writer is perhaps the ultimate capitalist, an infopreneur who is profoundly empowered by blogging and its tools.

Any publishing business with more than one employee has higher overheads and less focus than the great bloggers flooding the market with news, insights and passion. While Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis use blog technology and idioms, their business model is still old line publishing.

Boiled down, the corporate model of media (whether done by Calacanis, NYT or Advance) looks like this:

owner : 1
boss : 1
ad sales : 1
flunky : 1
writer : 1
marketing person : 1
IT : 1

The blogging model looks like this:

writer/owner/boss : 1
marketing : 100s of peer bloggers (blogosphere)
ad sales : 100s of peer bloggers (Blogads)+Google
IT : Typepad or pMachine

The second model has 10,000 times the fire power with 1/6 the mouths to feed. Would someone please explain how the corporate model can compete… what the heck am I missing?

Marx is grinning in his grave; thanks to Moore’s law and the Internet, writers now can own the means of production that, previously, only publishers could afford. The only monopoly left in media is the individual’s ownership of his or her own talent. With a strong voice and loyal audience, Rojas will be working for himself and not Calacanis soon enough.

Calacanis brags, in New York magazine, that he’s soon going to be hiring New York Times journalists and, gasp, giving them equity. Equity! Bless you master Calacanis for sharing a few precious drops of equity with a mere writer.

WTF? I guess I’m stupid. I don’t get why a writer should be excited about getting some equity and working for someone else, when he can own 100% of his own gig and call his own shots.

(I’m keeping abreast of all this by reading the incomparable Jeff Jarvis.)

Something funny often happens on Friday afternoons.

Business ticks up a notch.

And, even better, I start hearing from folks scratching their heads about blogads. This happens most days, but I can always count on a good dose of brainstorming starting at 3PM Friday.

This afternoon, I talked to three different people in quick succession — an entrepreneur, a environmentalist and a campaign manager. The conversations were remarkably similar. What makes a good blogad? What’s a good landing page look like? What kind of impact — sales, buzz or zeitgeist nudging — might result from a good fusillade of blog advertising?

It’s really fun. Talking to smart, ambitious people about how blogs can help them reach national audiences — passionate, influential and affordable national audiences — is a great way to spend a Friday afternoon.

But, what is it about Friday afternoon — starting at 3 and ending around 6PM — that makes it the witching hour for blog advertising? I really don’t know.

BTW, I started blogging late in the afternoon exactly two and half years ago.

And, before I forget it, here’s the new Harvard case study of the bloggers who upended Trent Lott in December 2002.

And you want to know something amazing? You can buy a week of advertising on the three blogs — Atrios, Instapundit and Talkingpoints — credited with rousting the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives… for $1000. Damn.

Lots of talk and observation about the latest Pew study, which shows that, among other things, 17% of Internet users have posted written material on Web sites. The most interesting number for me, though, is this one “11% of Internet users have read the blogs or diaries of other Internet users.”

Believing fervently that blogs offer a superior media (or should I say unmedia) experience for most readers, I’ve often wondered how many people haven’t yet heard of blogs… which is to say how many more people we can still expect to discover blogs and become addicted.

This Pew number is much higher than I expected, particularly because a number of people have probably visited blogs but don’t know that’s what they are visiting. So maybe the number is 20%? That’s quite a contrast to a couple of years ago when NOBODY I met — except bloggers — had heard of blogs. My wife and I used to share the same grim laugh after a night dining with friends — when would someone do more than mumble politely or giggle discreetly when I mentioned the word blog?

Today, I’m no longer longing to meet people who know what blog means. On the contrary, when I meet a blog reader… darn, another market already conquered, I think.

So, if 20% of the American internet users have used blogs, does this mean that blog traffic can only grow 5 times from here?

I’d suggest no — many of today’s readers haven’t yet found exactly the favorite blogs — indeed many of those blogs have yet to be birthed. So shall we say 10 or 20 times? Moreover, we know that the longer people are on the Internet, the greater their usage. Folks who have been online 6+ years use the internet 15.8 hours per week, 50% more than folks who have been online 4 years (10.9 hours), and three times longer than people who’ve been online less than one year (5.5 hours). (That piece of vital but widely ignored data is buried on page 22 of this UCLA report.)

So will the readership for weblogs some day reach 30X or 100X current levels? If you find this post via Google in five years, leave a comment and tell us how things turned out.

I came across this anecdote reading Martha Ackmann’s The Mercury Thirteen. In the late fiftees, NASA was struggling to master the art of building safe rockets. Rocket after rocket blew up.

In the spring of 1959, when the seven astronaut candidates were first brought to watch an Atlas rocket lift off, the rocket blew up on the launch pad. After a few minutes of silence as the men watched debris shower down over the ocean, Alan Shepard muttered to his compatriots: “well, I’m glad they got that out of the way.”

Two years later, when Shepard became the first American in space, NASA’s brass had three speaches prepared… one for success, one for ocean bailout and one for Shepard’s annihilation.

For users of Typepad wishing to sell Blogads, here’s some advice compiled by Todd Melet from information provided by Typepad’s able help desk.

To add your blogads javascript code into a Link TypeList:

- Create a new Link TypeList, named “Extras” or something like that.

- Add the TypeList to your template when given the opportunity after creating the list

- Click ‘Add new item’ for the TypeList and paste the HTML into the *Notes* section of the item

- Set the configuration of the TypeList to “display notes as text”

Here are some additional tips using the title/url fields instead of the “notes”:
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