blogads for the opinion makers

Outline for blog$ session:

I hope this session works in extreme socratic mode. Everyone in the room will get called on to contribute both questions and answers. The stuff below is just a foundational list.

I’d like to situate the discussion between two poles. On the one side, Business Week says: “Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere.” Are you looking forward to working for MSM?

On the other side, with MSM clearly collapsing — Tribune Circ rev down 9% in a year! — somebody intelligent BETTER step into the vacuum that will occur when the current media ecosystem finally (soon) collapses.

So, some categories of discussion:
– what are bloggers’ “unique selling propositions” in the info-economy? (Remember, MSNBC.com sells ad space for $0.10 CPMs!)
—- * passion
—–* networkness
—–* audience loyalty
—–* influentials audience
– what technologies/services currently enable bloggers to efficiently monatize their audiences?
—–* Blogads, Adsense, Pheedo
– are indie bloggers unsafe for advertisers… or safer?
– what is the current/potential role for publishers (traditional or newmedia) versus indies in the economics of blogging?
—–* NYT, Salon, Slate, BusinessWeek
—–* Gawker, MarketingVox, PaidContent, WeblogsInc, Corante, GrassrootsMedia, HuffingtonPost
– what new technologies/services might help indie-bloggers monatize their audiences?
– how many bloggers will earn a living from blogging in 5 years?
– do bloggers compete with each other for ad$?
– unless anyone vehemently disagrees, I’m going to leave discussion of “getting hired to do blogging as PR for a company” for another session. Many people will make a good living doing this in coming years, but I think that career path is pretty clear, so would like to focus on murkier/bigger stuff.

Original post: Robert Cox, the gyroscope steering the Media Blogger’s Association has pulled together a great Bloggercon in Nashville May 6-7.

Here’s the schedule, with participants including Glenn Reynolds, Staci Kramer, LaShawn Barber, Mark Glaser, Ed Cone, Rebecca McKinnon and Hossein Derakhshan.

Register here.

My jam session will be modeled on the session Jeff Jarvis orchestrated at Bloggercon II. Though I don’t normally talk as fast as Jeff, I’ll be sure to drink plenty of coffee and get everyone in the room talking and resonating about where things are going.

I’m off this week and will post a draft outline for the session when I’m back. I’m glad there’s a session on making money — self-supporting bloggers are the future of media. (As both historic curiousities and benchmarks, here are posts I wrote about the topic three years ago and two years ago.)

Two lists of verbs to consider as the FEC considers regulating blogs…

You and I
blog
call
love
hate
hunt
mate
kick
read
vote
kiss
give
take
fish
lick
talk
walk
live
feed

It and they
editorialize
incorporate
decimate
legislate
exploit
propose
publish
print
adjudicate
announce
invest
apply
pronounce
convene
convoke
impose
express
leverage
prevaricate
censure
lobby

We’re going to Quebec to practice skiing and our slushy French. Back in a week.

I’m leaving sales in the capable hands of Anthony and Miklos, with Peter carrying the support load.

Anthony has picked up both the lingo and technology of blogads as fast as a five iron. (He’s a scratch golfer.) So we’ll be looking to hire a junior person in coming weeks to help out.

Before you wish me goodbye, read Ken’s latest screed, proving yet again why he’s my favorite living author.

Another termite gnaws at the dead-tree pulpers. Michael Malone :

In any other industry, a product that lost 1 percent of market share for two decades ‘ only to then double or triple that rate of decline ‘ would be declared dead. The manufacturer would discontinue it and rush out a replacement product more in line with the desires of the marketplace. So, let’s finally come out and say: Newspapers are dead. They will never come back. By the end of this decade, the newspaper industry will suffer the same death rate ‘ 90-plus percent ‘ that every other industry experiences when run over by a technology revolution.

So why do newspapers linger on? Why do so many papers refuse to accept reality and metamorphize into real Web presences rather than merely online downloads of their print copy?

One answer is that most newspapers are unbelievably retrograde. They grew up in a world of newsprint and that’s where they intend to stay. They cannot believe an institution as venerable as the newspaper can ever go away.

They are wrong. And their publications will die first. All of them.

Via Buzzmachine.

AtariDemocrat.

Journalism school professors who climb on soapboxes and proclaim that editorial decisions at leading publishers are unaffected by advertising should mourn the passing of the NYTimes‘ Circuits section.

At a time when interest in e-life is EXPLODING, the Times can not claim that the decision is made with the readers’ best interests in mind. Clearly the Times wasn’t able to compete for tech ad $s.

www.Dailykos.com now has ten classifieds. Interesting to see if other blogs adopt this approach.

New blogad sellers: PVRblog, Open All Night, How Appealing … other great folks on the way.

A good graphic and commentary at Boingboing.

WSJ: “The Louvre giftshop sells more than 330,000 Mona Lisa items annually, including 200,000 postcards, 20,000 magnets and 10,000 puzzles.”

Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Greens, Libertarians.

Some highlights:

– Democrat blog readers are most likely to contribute online (78%) while Libertarians the least (53%).

– Republican blog readers make the most (70% over 60K) and Greens the least (50% over 60K).

– Greens are the most antagonistic to TV (48% think it is worthless) versus 22% of Republican readers.

– More Republican readers think blogs are “extremely useful” (59%) versus Greens (44%.)

– Republicans are older; more Democratic blog readers are female.

– Libertarian and Green blog readers are mostly likely to be bloggers themselves (29%), while Republican blog readers are least likely to be bloggers (17%.)

Taegan Goddard summarizes the results of his readers’ responses.

Taegan Goddard’s Politicalwire is the first to sell blogad classifieds. Fittingly, the first ad peddles the URL www.political.com.

The second is a help-wanted ad from Oceana.org, which I fondly recall was the first DC advocacy group to buy blogads back in ‘03:

Oceana is looking for a skilled web developer to use open source to help us in our mission to save the world’s oceans. We believe in the potential of the Web as an advocacy medium, and you’ll be helping us bring it to life — applying technologies like Linux, PHP, MySQL, RSS, and other cool tech along the way. If you love open source and want to make a real difference in the world instead of just grinding out cookie-cutter web sites, come join us!

So far, I’m very pleased with the nuts-and-boltsiness of these ads.

Update: Instapundit has just created a bulletin board also.

This ad format is still in beta, so we need your feedback. What would make these ads most useful?

Yes, you already knew that intuitively.

Now you can tell your pajama-bashing friends that the data from last week’s blog reader survey indicates that 70% of blog readers are influentials, those articulate, networked 10% of Americans who set the agenda for the other 90%. (RoperASW, the folks who wrote the book on Influentials, have more information on the definition on influentials here.)

I guess the CBS guy just forgot to mention that those pajamas are silk, not rayon.

When I mentioned 70% data last Friday at the panel on influentials at the George Washington University conference on Online Politics, Carol Darr, the institute’s director, said this ratio correlated with the data that her group had observed last year in a study of influentials online.

To put the blogosphere’s influentials density in context, consider that the WashingtonPost.com likes to brag that 34% of its readers are influentials. (See bottom of page 4 on this PDF.)

MediaPost did a good job synchronizing last week’s blog reader poll with Gallup’s survey, also published last, indicating that only 32 of Americans are even somewhat familiar with blogs.

Frank Newport, editor in chief at Gallup poll, says his results are not inconsistent with Copeland’s conclusion. Newport compared readers of blogs to readers of The New York Times. “We know that only a fraction of the American public reads the Times, but it affects everyone because that’s what the people who control mainstream media read.”

“In conducting our poll, it was not our intent to measure blogs’ gross influence,” said Newport. “I think it’s obvious that the most influential people in our society are the ones who read these things.”

For another angle on the same topic, see Kate Kaye’s post about my question to the WashingtonPost.com’s Cliff Sloan at Friday’s IPDI debate.

Here’s more coverage of the reader survey.

(We’re still exporting stuff from SurveyMonkey… slowly.)

Senator Harry Reid tells RawStory “What has happened in recent years, the Fairness Doctrine has been taken away, that is, equal time for pros and cons on an issue. And they also allowed the concentration of media power, so one station, one owner can own 1,200 radio stations. What this means is that wealth and power control most everything in this country. But one thing they do not control’wealth and power does not control the Internet. Through the Internet, regular ordinary people have a voice. That’s why I go out of my way to communicate any way that I can on the Internet and I think the blogs are a tremendously important way for the American public to find out what’s really going on.”

I’m getting stale on conferences these days, going to an average of two a month.

But I’m definitely going to SXSW next year. I’ve never had a better time conferencizing. The panel sessions were OK-to-good, the evenings were OUTSTANDING.

Normally at a conference cocktail hour, you find yourself spending ten minutes trying to find some common ground with the person next to you. At SXSW, you just had to turn to your left and introduce yourself and instantly, ka-ching, you were saying “wow, I’ve always wanted to meet you.”

Other friends, old and new, I enjoyed seeing: Will Pate, Steve Reading, Jim Cudney, Biz Stone, Eric Case, John Vars, Milan Negovan, Jackson West, Tony Pierce, Tantek Celik, Evan Williams, Richard Luckett, Ana Marie Cox, Philip Kaplan, Jason Calcanis, Tiffany Brown, Gokul Rajaram, Lockhart Steele, Jason Shellen, Alaina Brown, Jake Dobkin, Marc Brown, Mitch Ratcliffe, Susan Kaup, Rex Hammock, Mike Slone, and Edward Cossette.

As Jenifer Hanen told me “this is my tribe.”

PUD gave me a copy of his F-ed company book. He signed it and I got dotcom survivors Biz, Ev, JasonC, Richard, JasonS, Jake and Tony to add dedications. JasonC, who can be witty when he tries, scribbled out: “to a gentleman and a scholar: may we be never be f-ed and may we always be in good company!” Ev wrote: “I once f-ed a company. Don’t recommend it.”

Here’s a photo of Biz and me taken by Eric.

Update: a more jaundiced view of our Woodstock@Motel6 from The Register and Jossip.

Here’s a fun new angle to blog advertising, actually an old angle revived.

When we started blogads, we imagined an intra-community bulletin board filled with birthday greetings, rants, books for sale, party announcements, personals, lost dogs, lost causes… all the advertising ephemera that makes life fun and interesting.

We got a few of those ads. Then prices started rising, and gradually squeezed out the human-scaled stuff.

Well, here’s back to the future. Another unapologetically anti-IAB unit: 500 characters, no image, no edit, no HTML, no breaks, no bulkbuy.

You can buy the first of these ads here here to run on the great blog Politicalwire.

The unit is still malleable, so let us know what you think. Just don’t tell us it doesn’t conform to IAB standards, because that’s the point.

If you are currently selling blogads and one to add an adstrip like this to your page, just click “create an adstrip” on the “adstrip manager” page and then choose “classie” on page 4 of the adstrip set-up process.

I’ll be at SXSW through Tuesday. If you are going, drop me a line and we’ll coordinate a collision. Speaking Monday at 5PM, though not yet sure where.

I turn 43 Monday, which may explain this post’s title.

I’m at an IPDI Online Politics conference. Fascinating people and topics, including the FEC’s wrestling match with the idea and execution of blogs.

I haven’t been able to get an e-mail out, so here is the URL for the results of this year’s blog reader survey.

The United Church of Christ placed a nice block of blogads today. You can read about the reasoning behind the order here.

Though we work with a growing list of religious blogs, both Christian and Jewish, this is, as far as I know, the first time a church has bought blogads. (This is also the first time I’ve seen a blog post written about a major blogad buy by the buyer.)

The blogads are part of the church’s attempt to end-run the TV networks who have rejected the church’s ad. As the UCC ad buyer put it:

In the tradition of this nation’s earliest pamphleteers, bloggers are sharing news and information as a mark of a truly free society, not as something that can be controlled and manipulated by multi-national corporations.

As well as being on the cutting edge of the evolution of media, there’s a certain historical symmetry in the church’s blogad order. The United Church of Christ represents America’s Congregationalist churches, which are the theological descendents of the Puritans. The Puritans came to America to speak their own minds and escape England’s rigid and heirarchical religious orthodoxy. And there’s more than a hint of the emphasis on personal autonomy and bottom-up truth-seeking in the blogging community.

This ad had a personal impact on me. When I mentioned my experience to the UCC’s ad buyer, he asked me to post to the UCC’s blog. You can read that post here.

Some of the great fun of the blogging business is the way small shifts in perspective can open up a huge new avenue of opportunity. Most days you stare at a brick wall, but some days you take a small step forward or sideways and feel like you’ve turned onto the Champs Elysee. One long broad straight road lined with trees and lights. The way forward is obvious.

I think Nick Denton just stepped around one such corner. Standing in as editor of one of his publications, Nick says: “I’ll be checking tips@gridskipper.com, but I had another idea. If you’re using Wists, Delicious or Flickr, and you’re posting an item that might be good for Gridskipper, just add a gridskipper tag. I’ll be monitoring the feeds. Maybe we can even syndicate them to gridskipper.com.”

The recent e-mail exchanges between Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, and Jeff Jarvis, blogger, are kinda surreal.

Keller is right (and pretty damn funny) in pointing out that Jarvis is a self-appointed chair of a committee of one and speaks for no-one but himself. But Keller seems to be realizing that he himself, an employee designated by some profit-seeking pension fund managers, lacks any unique non-corporate claim to the epistemological or civic podium.

The context: corporate media is on the run, and the Keller/Jarvis e-mail mud wresting is a sign of the times. On the business side, publishers see revenues leaching away to Google, Craiglist, Monster, eBay and thousands of no-overhead publishers. On the editorial side, publishers realize that their 400-year-old monopoly on the publishing megaphone is gonzo. Thanks to free blogging software and the blogosphere’s speed-of-light neural network, a rag-tag army of swarming individuals increasingly leads public opinion.

Ten years ago, the New York Times’ editor might have claimed that the newspaper’s one million readers had “elected” him truth-meister. But today Keller knows that some bloggers individually and many in aggregate can make the same claims. Worse, Keller knows that bloggers themselves helped oust one of his own predecessors, Howell Raines.

It used to be that the editor of the NYT or LAT could say “it is not news until we report it.” That used to be literally true — most people didn’t pay attention to a story until a big paper or three jumped into the fray. “News” was something manufactured by publishers. Now the thought sounds ludicrous.

Vis the economic and communication function of media, the key question is what/how we
constitute “common knowledge.” There’s lots of emerging economic theory around the importance of “common knowledge” — the idea that I know that you know that I know that you know something. Corporate media used to be the unrivalled engine for creating common knowledge. That’s less true every day.

At present, bloggers can’t run a news cycle on their own, from gossip to factoid to outcry to resignation. Blogs still need corporate media to complete the chain-reaction, because blogs lack corporate media’s mass market reach. We haven’t yet reached the point where everyone says “everyone knows ABC…” because ABC has been covered by DailyKos and/or Instapundit. But that day is coming fast. And when blogs become the acknowledged manufacturers of common knowledge, corporate media will be superfluous to advertisers. (Which is not to say bad or societally useless.)

Sounds pretty draconian, I know, but if you connect the dots — persistently rising blog
traffic, opinion maker migration into p2p communication, eroding corporate publishing audiences, cannibalization of corporate revenue streams by online players — that’s where you end up.

I will miss corporate media’s thoughtful investigative journalism and great beat reporting. But I’m pretty sure the market won’t.

(I originally wrote this in answer to Hugh Forrest’s question for the SXSW Q&A page. http://2005.sxsw.com/interactive/?PHPSESSID=e2a4e0d0c3f91251d3ba662eab189f24 … other answers will be posted there later this week.)

Lots of people are excited that Jason Kottke is turning “pro” as a blogger.

Well, not exactly professional because he’s not getting paid by anyone for a specific good or service, he’s asking for donations, patronages, whatever. Fine. A hyper-text busker.

Heck, I sent him $50 last week and wished him luck.

But why sneer at bloggers who sell ads? Jason: “A lot of people don’t like advertising, and I wouldn’t want advertising to change what I write’you know, having to change a post because it offends an advertiser or writing posts in a certain way where it would make sure that certain Google ads appear on the page.”

Hell, a lot of people do like advertising, Jason. Craigslist does 1.4 billion page impressions a month of the sordid stuff. Many magazines are bought as much for their ads as their articles. eBay, the biggest cultural institution invented in the United States in the last 100 years, is one giant advertising factory. And some of our political culture’s most interesting scraps of 2004 are ads bought and unbought on blogs like Jason’s.

Anyway, good luck busking.

Ken Layne, who recently had a son, notes that our friends “Charlie & Bonnie had a baby girl last night, and I was mighty happy to hear this good news. This whole “let’s all have a bunch of babies” thing is fun as hell. There’s a serious Martian Mining Colony gang in the works, in 20 years or so, and I hope they all send lots of e-mail & photos back to their folks here on Earth.”

I’ve decided next Christmas I’m only buying presents from blog advertisers, as part of our “We wish you a bloggin’ Christmas” (TM) campaign. The early contender for my chief Santa’s helper is the irredeemably irresistibly Reemco.

We went fishing last Saturday and briefly landed a catfish. First soccer practice on Thursday, cool but brilliant. Walked to school today, after a long winter of riding. T-bones with Tig Tillinghast last night here, introducing dogs and telling him about our favorite children’s books. Two great videos this week via Netflix, Small Change and the Dinner Game. Dinner at Carrburittos. A captivating child’s copter game. As with most human endeavors, gravity rules.

Yale does a good thing.

Alex Lencicki of Crown Books, pivotting off of Knopf’s advertising for the esoteric cult hit Kafka on the shore, serves up a blogad for the new book Angry Black White Boy, a hip-hop inversion of Invisible Man.

Instead of serving up the publishing industry’s online standard, a shrunken and fuzzy book cover that insults the viewer, Crown gives us custom-designed bold, ink-dripping image perfectly sized to fit on a blog.

Crown doesn’t quite equal Knopf’s genius of excerpting/linking to blogs — the book hits stores tommorrow — but does link directly to a review in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Crown one-ups Knopf, though, with an MP3 of the book’s prologue, including the click-bait “explicit lyrics.”

Great to see a couple of book publishers brainstorming and learning from each other in public, real-time text.

Like bloggers, really.

The Federal Election Commission is mulling regulating blogs, notes Michael Bassik. An FCC member suggests bloggers’ links might be regulated: “Would a link to a candidate’s page be a problem? If someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they’re at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law.”

So we’ll be regulating the ability of American citizens to express themselves online.

Glenn Wilson (a party to the suit in question) e-mails:

The copyright protection status of every electronic journal in the country is on the line. Please listen up and get ready to help.

All online publishers should file friend of the court briefs in the case of Glynn Wilson v. Random House and Kitty Kelly for plagiarizing Glynn Wilson’s Bush AWOL story.

Otherwise, a federal judge in Birmingham, Alabama is about to rule, effectively, that we have no copyright protection publishing online. THIS IS A HUGE DEAL.

The copyright office at the Library of Congress needs to write some new rules on this. They now say that electronic journals do not have to mail register stories to be protected. But the legal precedents under the old statute say you do. This is a gray area in the law that needs to be cleared up.

Certainly it was not Thomas Jefferson’s intent to allow corporate publishers to steal from online publications without fear of being sued for copyright violation for plagiarism. Was it? So the spirit of the law and the purpose of the law is on our side, if the precedents are not.

This is a huge national story. Please check with your legal counsel and your editor and publisher and get involved.

Brian Clark, who orchestrated last fall’s purchase for Sharp TV and has a shockingly fun order up his sleeve:

Blog ads (in the generic sense, and especially BlogAds in the particular sense) are… bringing ads into the conversation. If they are done right, they out-perform traditional creative placements by so much it makes my clients nervous for me to talk about particulars.

Last year we had a lot of fun doing a reader survey. With the dust of the election settled and lots of folks chattering about “whither blogs?” it’s time to do another.

If you want to send readers to do the survey, just link to the 2005 blog reader survey (copy/ paste this actual link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=34292894798 into your blog) and tell people to supply your blog’s name as the answer to question #16. The survey should take about four minutes to complete. The results will help us communicate with advertisers, the press and the public about the huge and unique audience that blogs serve.

If your blog readers put your blog name in #16, we’ll then happily provide you the full data broken out for your own readership in coming weeks.

The newest version of Pennacchio’s blogad links to bloggers talking about his campaign. As one blogger puts it: “Dr. P channels the spirit of Howard Dean.”

An EPA-approved doomsday.