blogads for the opinion makers

Ken Layne, hater of all things new, spawns the evil idea of “iJacking.”

How does it work, you ask? Simple. These days, people often share songs with their pals, which is a terrible crime known as Piracy or Felony Child Endangerment. Find out what kind of music your victim enjoys. If it’s your wife, for example, you might casually ask, ‘Lady, do you enjoy music? If so, please list three musical acts that would interest you, especially if I said I just downloaded secret new bootleg music by these acts.’

Then you offer to put this secret music on her iPod.

And then you load a cornucopia of awful things onto said iPod.

What kind of awful things? I’d stay away from traditional ’songs,’ because they tend to be several minutes long ‘ giving the victim time to skip the song and find out its title ‘ and there’s always the chance your victim will actually enjoy whatever crap music you install. Instead, just put a bunch of Deeply Wrong short audio clips, things that flash by with great weirdness & violence, leaving your victim confused and agitated. Did I really just hear that?

Here’s some fine material I found on the Google in just minutes: animal sounds, police sirens, scary guns, utterly devastating Kentucky Fried Chicken employee-training tapes, etc.

Another good idea is to record yourself yelling at the person, or record strangers yelling at the person to do something, like ‘Duck!’ or ‘Hands up, Creep!’ You will need to be creative when recording these tiny mp3 files. HOT TIP: Use a stereo microphone for these bits and stand to the left or right of the mic when yelling; it’ll sound much more realistic when your victim is jogging or whatever and suddenly hears an angry voice in one ear. If your victim is religious, get somebody with a creepy British accent to say godly stuff, very personal. God is ashamed of what you did with that guy, etc. Got a bug-phobic buddy? Try a swarm of bees! Let the victim’s unique personal fears and shame help you choose the perfect sounds!

Ken, the master of nasty tricks and disinformation, elsewhere claims that he and I learned about podcasting at the same time. I swear I knew about it at least five minutes before Ken. Speaking of Ken and (lower on the page) Business Week, Ken reminds me of the time a bunch of stuff Ken had written online for one publication magically migrated into an article by someone else in Business Week. (See clenched teeth editor’s note at the bottom of this story… iJacked as it were.) And speaking of iJacking, try this gorgeous ballad on your iPod.

A good article from the NYTimes about the crumbling franchise TV Guide, trying to keep up with TV and its myriad audiences.

In a presentation to Gemstar’s biggest investors, the company identified a quandary for TV Guide, 95 percent of whose circulation is by subscription: a large portion of the subscribers are “traditionalist,” “older, 65-plus” and “more analog,” compared with those who are listed as younger and “digital.” Mr. Loughlin did not say what percentage was in the “older” category, but he conceded that TV Guide’s subscribers were unlikely to impress the advertisers in a more upscale publication like, say, Vanity Fair. “It’s a mass book,” he said of TV Guide. “It isn’t Traditional Home.”

In its 2004 annual report, Gemstar acknowledged a “substantial decline” in program advertising - the ads for particular movies and shows in the listings. It added that the decline of these ads, the core of TV Guide’s ad revenue, “could be permanent.”

I always admire the courage of Times reporters who dig into corporate publishing maladies that are so darn close to home for their own livelyhoods.

Meanwhile, blogger Michael Prieve spun the dial today and built a neat network of TV blogs. If you want to support their new network, drop this link in your HTML:

<a href=http://www.blogads.com/advertise/tvblogs_ad_network/order>Advertise on TV weblogs</a>

Here’s the great logo Michael concocted:

Steven Berlin Johnson, one of my favorite writers, has a new contrarian book coming out about how television shows, and their watchers, are actually becoming smarter.

All of what Johnson says about TV has to be learned by advertisers too. I can’t summarize his arguments well enough, but here are some hints from an article in the Sunday NYTimes magazine.

“Since the early 80’s, however, there has been a noticeable increase in narrative complexity in these dramas. The most ambitious show on TV to date, ‘The Sopranos,’ routinely follows up to a dozen distinct threads over the course of an episode, with more than 20 recurring characters. An episode from late in the first season looks like this.”

“The deliberate lack of hand-holding extends down to the microlevel of dialogue as well.”

“If early television took its cues from the stage, today’s reality programming is reliably structured like a video game: a series of competitive tests, growing more challenging over time. Many reality shows borrow a subtler device from gaming culture as well: the rules aren’t fully established at the outset. You learn as you play.”

“You have to focus to follow the plot, and in focusing you’re exercising the parts of your brain that map social networks, that fill in missing information, that connect multiple narrative threads.”

And, in the same issue Michael Lewis writes a wonderful portrait of the battle between other people’s expectations and your own identity, between being perceived “in” and struggling for recognition. He closes:

In Anaheim that afternoon, Brendan Donnelly quickly got ahead of Teahen, 0-2, and then tried to put him away with a pitch on the outside corner. Teahen reached out — and when he reached he traveled backward in time . . . he was reaching not for Brendan Donnelly’s fastball, he was reaching for . . . a Wiffle ball and trying to flick it over the left-field wall. He was reaching out as a small, fast high-school middle infielder who was not designed to hit home runs . . . he was reaching the way a small boy who doesn’t know he will grow into a big man reaches, just hoping to poke the ball into the hole between third and short and beat it out. He was reaching out the way he had always reached out. They had tried to stop him from reaching out. To teach him power. They had tried to sever his game from its roots. And he didn’t let them. And that was why his bat made hard contact with Brendan Donnelly’s sinking fastball. That’s why he was here now. In the big leagues. Standing on first base. Safe.

If you read print newspapers, you may have seen a full page ad last week in the New York Times or today in USA Today taking Wal-Mart to task for relying on cheap Chinese labor and depending on US taxpayers to fund its worker healthcare.

And if you read blogs, you’ve seen ads like this. The ad is a little busy for my taste and I’d love to see some links in the text, but the overall message is strong. Walmart Watch, the group running those ads, has a community website packed with information and a blog. Here’s their post about the USA Today ad . And the post about the NYTimes ad.

Straddling the line between elderly media and online, Jeff Jarvis continues to excel as the go to man for the latest obituaries. Today’s post contains this chart excised from a Mary Meeker presentation at Adtech (where I’m on a panel tomorrow about blog advertising if you feel like stopping by.) This chart and others in Meeker’s presesentation presentation that traditional media gets far too much ad revenue relative to its mindshare.

Levis, one of the great brand names in retailing, has bought blogads on a bunch brand name blogs. Fittingly, the ad is all about simplicity and authenticity. What better media than blogs to convey that message?

Yesterday a friend who runs a hedge fund reminded me of the Wall Street maxim — “sell when Business Week’s cover says buy.”

I’m pretty sure Business Week is right about blogging but wrong about its own role in the game. More thoughts in the blog post below.

But first, its kinda fun to look at the tortured history of Business Week covers. The most famous example of this, of course, is the 1979 Business Week cover “The Death of Equities.” Paul Kedrosky has that cover and a great graph of the next 20 years bull market. Some facts from the article: Baby boomers won’t save. Gold is a safe long term bet.

How could Business Week be so wrong? Precisely because the publication’s staff does a wonderful job. Each cover is a finely tuned encapsulation of conventional wisdom. The magazine’s editors and staff cannot afford to go out on a limb and highlight truly revolutionary ideas or un-heralded companies — they might be wrong and look idiotic. They are not paid to be visionaries or speculators, they are paid to report. Covers can be done only if enough of the “right” people agree on something and are willing to be quoted.

So, for the savvy patient investor, Business Week covers can be a contrarian gold mine. As the few examples below show, Business Week often jumps on the bandwagon just as it goes off the cliff. Though every article contains a few qualifiers, bold declarations on Business Week’s cover are a good sign that the opposite will soon happen.

(So what should blogging entrepreneurs think about Business Week’s cover story: “Blogs Will Change Your Business: Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later.” Is blogging over? Or is it is possible that this article is actually ahead of its time, since it clearly represents the first hand discussions and biases of editors, journalists and managers within Business Week, rather than just third hand ideas gummed to death by experts and conventional wisdom. Again, more thoughts below.)

Only time will tell. Anyway, this morning I spent an hour combing the index of Business Week covers looking for wrongheaded calls. Here are some classics:

October 1997: “NETSPEED AT NETSCAPE How the hottest software startup in history plans to outrun Microsoft and remain master of the Web.” (You remember Netscape, right?)

November 1997: “THE NEW ECONOMICS OF OIL: With technology dragging down the cost of finding and producing the precious stuff, prices won’t rise–even as demand soars.” (Here’s nice chart of the subsequent steady rise in oil prices.)

December 1997: “Now that you know there’s limited upside potential for stocks, what to do?” (See graph at bottom.)

December 1998: “So investors shouldn’t count on being carried aloft by a sharply rising market. Instead, they’ll have to be highly selective to make money. First, they should survey the landscape–check out what economists are forecasting, what the pros are doing, who’s shorting what, and the latest from BUSINESS WEEK’s fearless forecasters.” (See graph below.)

October 1999: “The Internet Age.” Sample headline: “A New Era of Bright Hopes and Terrible Fears
Companies that can ‘blast you out of your place’ abound.”

December 1999:
“Internet mania paid off big time for investors in 1999, and incredibly, the dot.coms have more room to run in 2000. Despite a prolonged midyear sell-off that ran from April to August, Internet stocks are up an incredible 154% this year through Dec. 10, as measured by the Dow Jones Internet Composite Index of 40 stocks. Investment pros doubt that Net stocks can repeat this kind of performance next year. Still, they see huge growth ahead for the Internet and believe that Net stocks will continue their drive north.”

February 2000: “Special Report: After 107 months, the American economic juggernaut is still going strong. What went right?”

Here’s a graph of NASDAQ before and after the “boom” cover:

Yipee. Business Week does a cover story on blogging and predicts that publishers will soon dominate the field.

The article makes many bold and valid claims (see below) about the blogging boom and then slips in this astonishing prediction: “Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere.”

Before we get to that brash claim about the coming triump of their employer’s business model, lets watch the BWers drink the blog coolaid:

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)…

How big are blogs? Try Johannes Gutenberg out for size. His printing press, unveiled in 1440, sparked a publishing boom and an information revolution. Some say it led to the Protestant Reformation and Western democracy. Along the way, societies established the rights and rules of the game for the privileged few who could afford to buy printing presses and grind forests into paper.

The printing press set the model for mass media. A lucky handful owns the publishing machinery and controls the information. Whether at newspapers or global manufacturing giants, they decide what the masses will learn. This elite still holds sway at most companies. You know them. They generally park in sheltered spaces, have longer rides on elevators, and avoid the cafeteria. They keep the secrets safe and coif the company’s message. Then they distribute it — usually on a need-to-know basis — to customers, employees, investors, and the press.

That’s the world of mass media, and the blogs are turning it on its head. Set up a free account at Blogger or other blog services, and you see right away that the cost of publishing has fallen practically to zero. Any dolt with a working computer and an Internet connection can become a blog publisher in the 10 minutes it takes to sign up.

Sure, most blogs are painfully primitive. That’s not the point. They represent power. Look at it this way: In the age of mass media, publications like ours print the news. Sources try to get quoted, but the decision is ours. Ditto with letters to the editor. Now instead of just speaking through us, they can blog. And if they master the ins and outs of this new art — like how to get other bloggers to link to them — they reach a huge audience.

This is just the beginning. Many of the same folks who developed blogs are busy adding features so that bloggers can start up music and video channels and team up on editorial projects. The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.

How does business change when everyone is a potential publisher? A vast new stretch of the information world opens up. For now, it’s a digital hinterland. The laws and norms covering fairness, advertising, and libel? They don’t exist, not yet anyway. But one thing is clear: Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they’re losing control of it.

Want to get it back? You never will, not entirely. But for a look at what you’re facing, come along for a tour of the blogosphere.

So far, so good, eh? Wow, everything is changing. Particularly publishing. To repeat: “The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.
How does business change when everyone is a potential publisher?

Sounds pretty grim if you are a publisher, doesn’t it? In an astonishingly unself-conscious piece of solipsism, the mag cover says “Blogs will change your business,” but the following article would better be titled “Blogs will change OUR business,” since lots more is said about the changes blogging will wreak on publishers than any of the thousands of other industries in America.

Which brings us to BW’s punchline/backflip.

A prediction: Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere…. Take a look at blog advertising today, and it’s hard to see a glittering future. Sure, enterprising bloggers make room on their pages for Google-generated ads, known as AdSense, and earn some pocket change.

Umm. Guys? A number of indie bloggers already make more each month than you make. And their year-over-year growth trajectory is a lot greater than yours. And they don’t have to worry what the boss thinks. And they’ve each got a brand name people adore. And they’ve got the lowest overheads in the publishing industry. Who do people want to work for — your failing industry, or themselves?

Allow me a prediction: indie bloggers are going to kick corporate ass.

Yes, blogs could be advertising nirvana, admits Business Week:

Still, blogs could end up providing the perfect response to mass media’s core concern: the splintering of its audience. Advertisers desperate to reach us need to tap niches (because we get together only once a year to watch the Super Bowl). By piggybacking on blogs, they can start working that vast blogocafé, table by table. Smart ones will get feedback, links to individuals — and their friends. That’s every marketer’s dream.

But never fear, says BW, the corporates will reclaim the field:

The big companies have what the bloggers lack. Scale, relations with advertisers, and large sales forces. They can use these forces to sell across all media, from general audience to bloggy niches.

Ahh, salesforces. Expensive, inept, lazy salesforces. Bosses. Managers. Lots of flowcharts.

This assumes, of course, that blog advertising is like advertising on MSNBC or BusinessWeek.com. Take it from somebody who registered the name “blogads.com” in March of 2002… it isn’t. If you think publishing has been transformed, don’t you think that its twin sister advertising is also being turned inside out? While traditional advertising is about megaphones and cheerleading, blog advertising is about conversing, listening as much as you talk. Think that the 20-management-tier command-and-control structure of conventional advertisers is going to be comfortable with crawling into this bee-hive?

Scale? Who has more scale than the blogosphere?

Relationships with advertisers? (Remember the “relationships” that buggy makers used to have with their customers?)

To take on bloggers, large publishing corporations (themselves slowly collapsing) will have to re-allign their cost structures, organograms, sales channels and mentalities.

Worst of all, they are going to have to cannibalize their own sales. They won’t do it.

It is not just publishing that is changing. Corporate publishers are going to have to change their relationships with advertisers. Heck, advertisers are going to have to change their relationship with advertising. (Quick, reread http://www.cluetrain.com/#manifesto.)

Periodical publishers didn’t start making money from Gutenburg’s invention until 50 years after his invention, in BW’s words, “sparked an information revolution” unrivalled until the invention of blogging. Publishers are three or more years late, just catching on to the ideas we were babbling about three years ago. Publishers haven’t caught up– they are still three years behind.

BW writer Heather Green (more on her in a minute) a quote from Clay Shirky that didn’t make it into the story: “I am a member of a church of the reform normative, whenever I concentrate on what things should be doing, I miss what things are doing.”

Here’s a parallel factoid that Virginia Postrel www.dynamist.com included in her NYTimes story about innovation last week: a 3M study “found that product ideas from lead users generated eight times the sales of ideas generated internally - $146 million versus $18 million a year - in part because lead users were more likely to come up with ideas for entire new product lines rather than minor improvements.”

In entrepreneurship, there’s a constant and healthy tension between dreaming about the next decade and focusing on today’s nitty gritty. The advantage bloggers (and their vendors) have over traditional publishers is that they ARE the users and the lag time between idea and execution is weeks rather than years. And the feedback loop is measured in minutes rather than years. So the innovation cycle is exponentially faster. As regular readers of this blog know, I don’t envy the corporate publishing incumbents.

Now about Heather Green — Heather was the first journalist to call about Blogads clear back in September ‘02 when we sold our first few blogads. The story didn’t make it into print.

Welcome to the new foodies blogad network catalyzed by SliceNY’s Adam Kuban. Great logo Adam.

Most of the foodblogs have already pulled an interesting ad from PBS for its upcoming “Cooking under fire ” series, which debuted this week. I’m sure more like this will follow.

The foodies join the first mininetwork, Amy Langfield’s federation of New York City blogads sellers.

Created and supported by bloggers in the same niche or locale, each network’s infrastructure and sales nitty gritty are powered by Blogads. Help juice fellow bloggers by posting a linking to their networks:

<a href=http://www.blogads.com/advertise/foodblog_ad_network/order>Advertise on food blogs</a>
<a href=http://www.blogads.com/advertise/new_york_city_blogads/order>Advertising on New York blogs</a>
<a href=http://www.blogads.com/advertise/evangelical_alliance/order>Advertise on Evangelical blogs</a>
<a href=http://www.blogads.com/advertise/sportsblogs/order>Advertise on sports blogs</a>
<a href=http://www.blogads.com/advertise/gay_blogads/order>Advertise on gay blogs</a>
<a href=http://www.blogads.com/advertise/baseball_blogosphere/order>Buy baseball blogads</a>
<a href=http://www.blogads.com/advertise/new_england_arts_and_entertainment_network/order>Advertise on New England arts and entertainment blogs</a>

If you want to organize a network, drop me a line and we’ll wire you up. (For my few fellow blog-theory-geeks, this is officially called “the revenge of the long tail.” For more perspective, here’s author Chris Anderson ’s blog.)

As new businesses sprout, old businesses rot and fall, making room and mulch for the seedlings. Reports AdAge:

Newspapers’ long-secure classified ads business has already eroded noticeably and could ultimately cost newspapers about 9% of its total ad revenues by 2007, two executives from consulting giant McKinsey & Co. told attendees of the Newspaper Association of America’s annual conference yesterday. …

Luis Ubinas and Jochen Heck warned that newspapers could lose $4 billion of “highly profitable” classified revenue by 2007 — or around 20% of newspapers’ 2004 classifieds revenue and just under 9% of the $46.6 billion in total newspaper ad revenue last year — if trends that afflict help-wanted classifieds spread to automotive and real-estate classifieds.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of classifieds to newspapers’ bottom lines. Those pages of pure agate type are so profitable that, according to Mr. Ubinas, one newspaper executive said classified ads were a “better business than printing dollar bills.”

But the proliferation of online sites as diverse as monster.com, realestate.com and craigslist.com has substantially complicated newspapers’ hold on the format. “Once upon a time, classifieds was the exclusive property of newspapers,” said Mort Goldstrom, the NAA’s vcie president of advertising. “That time is over.”

The chilling part, Mr. Ubinas said, is that the key problem is not the competitors but rather what their pricing is doing to the entire classifieds model, calling it “price destruction.”

Another chilling fact: “Online is capturing all the growth,” he said.

A McKinsey analysis, Mr. Ubinas said, showed that an “Internet effect” began affecting help-wanted classifieds as early as 1995 and has resulted in an ever-widening gap between what historical trends would portend as expected help-wanted linage and what help-wanted’s true results were. In 2003, Mr. Ubinas reported, help-wanted classifieds were off 50% from levels that would be expected had decades of previous trend lines held true. …

My friend Jeff Jarvis spends lots of time badgering publishers to “get the Internet religion” and magically transform themselves. I think Jeff is wasting valuable pixels and breath. You can’t teach a pig to fly. A business is a carefully constructed ecosystem, each piece and person supporting and depending on the others and a web of customers and suppliers. Businesses are hard-wired to do certain things. Newspaper execs and owners can’t change an entire value chain, organogram and cost structure just because some consultants tell them to.

Some Spaces bloggers (or members?) are annoyed that I’ve referred to their cohort as as “nobodies.”

I apologize for hurting people’s feelings. I used “nobodies” because that is what, in the eyes of Madison Avenue, most Spaces members are. The word “uninfluential” is kinda obtuse, so in the interest of polemical fury, I stuck with something blunt. (Hell, I’m a nobody too; only about 200 people read this blog a day.) But lest “nobodies” becomes a sticking point, let’s call all us generic bloggers with 1-200 friendly readers a day “uninfluentials.”

The “uninfluentials” point is more or less conceded by a Spaces developper Matt, who says in the comments to this post, “Most blogs on Spaces have a small readership, and that readership is mainly comprised of the author’s friends and family. This has been the product’s intention all along, encouraged by associating IM contacts with their Spaces etc.”

Mark, another Spaces blogger, suggest that I’m upset that Spaces bloggers are ” newbies.” Frankly, the only newbie who worries me is Microsoft, newbie to the game of selling blog advertising. Does anybody out there — hi Mom! — think Microsoft isn’t a newbie to be worried about? This the company that believes in 99% market share.

To restate my case, peddling ad space on “4.9 million!” nobody-or-nothing blogs, Microsoft is taking money out of the pockets of great independent bloggers and muddying their pitch to advertisers who are looking to access “influentials” through blog advertising.

Microsoft could single-handedly move blogging back to the traditional industrial paradigm in which publishers capture 95% of the revenues and writers get the crumbs. With sufficient traction with advertisers and a dash of predatory pricing, Microsoft could strip influential bloggers back to the state in which publishers have tried to keep them for the last 400 years: peonage. Then they’d be peons… hmmm… nobodies… excuse me… uninfluentials.

I stumbled into watching Charles and Camilla wed, and was surprised by their grizzled candor in selecting lines from Wordsworth’s Ode to Immortality:

O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That Nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:–
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!

In another random poetry note, the London suburb Slough is the home of The Office. I once visited a newspaper in Slough trying to sell Pressflex services. I met an wonderfully supercilious and self-infatuated IT guy and came away unimpressed by Slough. (Meeting this character was another turn in my pilgrimage to the conviction that most newspapers are doomed.) So I got a good chuckle when later discovered John Betjeman’s poem Slough:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town –
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week for half-a-crown
For twenty years,

And get that man with double chin
Who’ll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women’s tears,

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It’s not their fault that they are mad,
They’ve tasted Hell.

It’s not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It’s not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sports and makes of cars
In various bogus Tudor bars
And daren’t look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

Political blogs explicated inin PDF and
in
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Click for images of top political blogs. (more…)

Obsolescent media: LAT circ rev down more than 9% in Q1: Reuters:

Tribune said circulation revenue fell 9 percent in the first quarter, with the sharpest declines at Newsday and the L.A. Times. Company executives said in a conference call with analysts that they expects all of the company’s papers to report lower circulation when data for the six months ended in March are reported next month.
The L.A. Times’ circulation struggles have been triggered by factors such as a new federal law limiting telemarketing as well as a deliberate decision by the newspaper to cut back on bulk sales programs.

Without Newsday and the LAT, the numbers were down “only” 4%.

Old new media: raising money and hiring a programmer and salesman. In a game in which longevity, extremely patient investors, perfect staff synchronization and low overheads are key, I don’t envy San Francisco based Battelle. (Thank you Amy.)

New media from an old new media pro covered by old media: Markos Moulitsas’ sports blogs covered by the NYTimes. “I realized that blogs were really effective for partisan audiences. One of them is sports. Sports is huge - where you’ve got your Red Sox and Yankees situation - and religion is another,” said Mr. Moulitsas. “But in religion, people kill each other, so I decided I’d rather stay away from religion.”

The last time I worked in an office, GHWBush was president and I was living in Manhattan. That was 14 years ago.

Since then, I’ve worked as a journalist and then an entrepreneur in basements and bedrooms and the dusty corners of friends’ offices. Since 1998, I’ve also spent lots of time in my company’s Budapest office.

But last month, having hired Anthony and with another hire on the way, I rented a small office. A very small office. I cut my capitalist teeth in a Wall Street bond trading firm where all the partners and staff were crammed elbow to elbow in a space some firms would devote to a single executive’s washroom.

Sitting elbow to elbow, we listened to learn and we learned to listen. And we had more fun.
So, as you can see, we’ve adopted pretty much the same attitude here. Here’s a photo taken by Peter, who is visiting from Budapest.

This week I’ve been watching the BBC version of The Office. I haven’t laughed harder in years. David Brent, the completely solipsistic boss is astonishingly true. He’s the caricature of the Cluetrainless company. All talk, no listen. All power, no touch. All smiles, no joy. All toadies, no friends. God save Blogads USA from David’s fate as we move into our own little office.

Some Spaces bloggers are accusing me of elitism and jealousy for flaming Volvo about sponsoring Microsoft’s vulgarity-strewn blogging service Spaces, according to a link forwarded by a friend of a friend at Microsoft. (Here’s yesterday’s post for those of you arriving via a direct link.) Spaces blogger Ed writes:

Blogads seems to have a bit of jealousy over MS’ recent deal with Volvo to be the premier sponsor for Spaces. Henry Copeland dregs up the worst of Spaces to make his point… without mentioning such great blogs as Paul Britton’s, Mike Torres, CanadianHawk’s, and The Psychedelic Circuit, all of which are on my blogroll. And I know I’m forgetting thousands if not millions more.

Ahh, yes, thousands if not millions more. My apologies to those four bloggers and their readers, and to the “thousands if not millions” of other great blogs at Spaces that Ed can’t quite recall the names of right now.

Come on Ed, make my day: take a few hours and name, off the top of your head, 20 Spaces blogs who have more than 100,000 page views a month.

While you get started on that, I’ll do five minutes of research on the number of Spaces pages where Volvo’s brand has joined words like: fuck: 15,400, cunt: 536, nigger: 48, faggot: 86, turd: 111, shit: 20,900, tits: 609, ass: 17,400, bitch: 8,540.

Jealous? Heck no. We’ve got hundreds of cool, smart advertisers. I’m angry. I’m angry to see blogging — which I revere for empowering excellence, autonomy and self-expression — debased by Microsoft into another exercize in corporate mass-market drek marketing. I’m angry Microsoft has diverted money out of great blogger’s pockets. I’m angry that anyone as smart as Steve Rubel can utter words like “MSN Spaces/Volvo Deal Shows Big Blog Advertisers Crave Safety” without noting that they’ve gotten the opposite.

My harping on the vulgarities among Spaces blogs makes Ed’s friend Ben ask: “Do we want free speech or not?” Hell yes, Ben. I’m just sure Volvo does not want to be associated with blogs like those it is now sponsoring with Microsoft’s able assistance. Let’s have some quality control baby. At Blogads, we make sure to steer certain advertisers away from profane blogs… and to steer other advertisers into those blogs. No matter what Microsoft told Volvo, the blogosphere is not a big barrel of content that can be bought sight unseen because it has a Microsoft label on it. As I said yesterday, individual bloggers themselves are the best guarantors of quality.

Finally, Ben accuses me of “blogging elitism.” Thank you Ben. Guilty as charged. I believe some bloggers are brilliant and others are idiots. If I were an advertiser, I’d glue my brand to the Einsteins and let Volvo chauffeur the cretins around.

Sure there are some smart people blogging at Spaces. But why didn’t Volvo just didn’t buy advertising on their blogs and actually pay those bloggers, rather than Microsoft?Again, to restate my case, blogging is about individualism, personality and self-expression. It’s about human automomy.

Volvo, buying ads across an undifferentiated anonymized corporate- conceived network full of dreck, emptiness and a few scraps of intelligence, has bought blogging’s worst qualities and quantities and very little of the best. For shame Microsoft and Volvo.

There’s been some huffing about Volvo’s purchase of ad space atop Microsoft’s “Spaces” blogging environment.

In an article titled “MSN Spaces/Volvo Deal Shows Big Blog Advertisers Crave Safety” in Webpronews
Steve Rubel wrote that a big brand “craves safety, as the Wall Street Journal noted last month. They are skittish about advertising on blogs. As a result, they will gravitate towards teaming with the larger players when it comes to experimenting with the medium.”

(In fact, only one ad executive in the WSJ’s article mentioned safety as an issue and the only ad “pulled” from a blog so far by an advertiser was running on a property of one of the “safe” corporate blog publishers Rubel highlights.)

Whatever. Volvo is getting a raw deal.

As Steve Hall of Adrants notes that most of Spaces blogs are “empty, useless, pointless weblogs.” “A quick review of weblogs listed as recently updated on MSN Spaces revealed few, if any, containing more than a post or two. Many simply state, ‘There are no entries in this blog.’” (Steve wrote asking what I thought of the deal — my reply to him seeded this post.)

To expand on Steve’s point, Volvo is, at best, paying to appear above MSNSpaces bloggers who are writing about random stuff, blogospheric noise. Spaces bloggers are newbies on the fringes of the blogosphere. Microsoft may well have promised Volvo 100 million page impressions a month, but these are impression seen by nobody — or more exactly “nobodies” — people who are viewed as influentials only by their moms and ex-girlfriends.

Sure Volvo’s brand is all about “safety” and Volvo may have felt safer buying blog advertising from Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft Spaces appears to censor profanity from blog titles and URLs, as Boingboing documented.

Buuuut… Volvo is still cozying up to the raw humanity of Microsoft Spaces bloggers writing
“fuck”
and
“cunt”
and
“nigger”
and
“faggot.”

All sponsored exclusively by Volvo. You go Volvo!

If you are a brand manager craving safety and premium audiences, wouldn’t you rather sponsor name-brand bloggers like Markos Moulitsas, Glenn Reynolds, Dave Winer, Jeralyn Merrit, Josh Marshall, Andrew Sullivan, Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker, Wil Wheaton, Jessa Crispin, Duncan Black, David Gutowski, Hugh Hewitt, Matt Haughey, John Sickles, Daniel Drezner, Howard Bashman… and hundreds more revered bloggers devoting themselves to themes like law or politics or music or religion or baseball? You can get ‘em all here.

Why advertise on the blogs of the anonymous once-a-month-bloggers when you can associate your brand (probably at much lower cost!) with intellectual stars, folks who have national reputations in their respective fields and who are hubs for rabidly loyal communities? And why inrich Bill Gates’ another 0.0000000027% when you can put money directly into a smart blogger’s pocket?

Blogging is the ultimate meritocracy and the name brand of Microsoft (or any other traditional publisher) is no guarantee of quality or safety. On the contrary, corporate umbrellas are increasingly havens for publishing mediocrity. Rushing to be trendy, Volvo has bought the wrong end of blogging and ignored the only name brands that mean anything: the bloggers’.

(Update: as a humorous coda, I drive a 1992 Volvo 240 wagon and my colleague Anthony drives a ‘95 Volvo 940, pictured partially below:

Jeff Jarvis: “The American Society of Newspaper Editors just reported that the number of newspaper journalists in America fell from 56,393 to 54,134 over the last four years.”

Tony Pierce comments: “how about this exercise: count how many print journalists you can name in three minutes. then count how many bloggers you can name in three minutes.”

You want to see the revenge of the long tail ? When it comes to creation of interesting local content, the tail whips here .

Just had lunch with Alex Macris, with whom we’ve done some business over the last year. He’s updated his agency’s website www.tapin.com which gives a pretty brilliant description of a certain slice of the folks advertisers are trying desperately to reach. Here’s a snippet:

Today’s young, digitally-savvy consumers have developed strong resistance to conventional advertising, even as they have become a favorite target of marketers worldwide. We call these consumers the NetSet’ ‘ and they are our audience.

NetSetters are off-beat contrarians who pride themselves on their innovation and individualism. They read Nietzsche, but watch cartoons. They work hard to differentiate themselves from the societal norm, but they do so in packs. They post their private thoughts and feelings into anonymous online journals to be read by the public. They hate being the target of advertising, but are always on the look-out for the ‘new-new thing.’

Macris just turned 30 and comes from an intense gaming background, as well as an unfortunate stint a law school in Boston. He’s among the handful of people I deal with who glimpse the future: advertising will have to engage rather than proposition consumers.

I love Welch when he’s mad at pompous torch bearers for mediocre corporate journalism. Here Matt dissects LAT columnist David Shaw’s assertions of journalistic privilege to shield laws versus the blogger rabble:

the culture of newspaper jobs is a culture of scarcity, over-editing, editorial circumspection, office politics, and both the good and bad tradition of modern-day newspapering. The culture of blogging is one of abundance, lack of editing, exuberance of expression, home offices, and both the good and bad “tradition” of a new and dynamically evolving medium. Are the differences between the two camps enough to deprive a journalism-producing weblogger the protections afforded a journalism-producing newspaper columnist? [Shaw writes]:

When I or virtually any other mainstream journalist writes something, it goes through several filters before the reader sees it. At least four experienced Times editors will have examined this column, for example.

Now there’s a walking advertisement for newsroom cuts…. Snark aside, it is not “filters” that make something “journalism,” it is the work itself. I can only speak for myself, but the act of writing without filters makes me much more careful in the treatment of facts and the truthfulness of words, because there’s no Copy Desk or Legal Department ready to vet the danger and check spelling. I’m slightly less careful only in the quality of the writing, and even then I assume that vomiting out verbiage sometimes produces net style positives compared with agonizing over every verb. Also, as someone who has written for a dozen newspapers, I’ll let the filter-awed readers in on a little secret: In every publication I’ve written for more than once, I’ve had final drafts published without so much as a moved comma. Some errors (few, thankfully) have passed through undetected, others have been edited in. Copy editing and especially fact-checking, at least in my experience, are the most overrated and wasteful aspects of modern journalism.

Read the whole thing please.

Meanwhile, academics are researching the personalities and demographics of bloggers. “We know that bloggers are not representative of Americans in general in certain respects,” Halavais says. “They tend to be younger, more urban, more educated, more technologically adept. They’re also early adopters and more willing to speak publicly about certain issues than other Americans, most of whom do not blog or even read blogs,” he adds.

A number of bloggers and readers have been asking “what the heck is up with those Virgil Tatum ads?” One reader called him “an obnoxious egomaniac.” A magazine writer inquired about profiling him. An agent asked about representing “Nisha,” the art theft recovery expert linked by another of the ads. Well here’s one gamer’s overview of the context of “Heist,” the Audi A3 advertising narrative that weaves it all together.

We here at ARGN prefer to see this particular instance of “blog advertising” for what it really is: the tip of the ARG iceberg. Props to Audi for joining the ranks of those who realize the potential of Alternate Reality Gaming. In true automotive spirit (as it is in Alternate Reality Gaming), the ride’s the thing, so get behind the wheel, buckle yourself in, and get ready for a trip you won’t soon forget.

Or as another gamer put it, offering a compendium of all the pieces to date

Heist is what we like to call an Alternate Reality Game (ARG). Simply put, it’s an interactive story told using real life events, character interactions, and Internet websites. We know that Heist is sponsored by Audi, but don’t think of it as a marketing campaign. Take it for what it is - a very fun and enjoyable game which you can participate in for free.

This campaign reminds me one of those four page ad fold-outs you get in the New Yorker or Vanity Fair that invite you to imagine yourself within a slightly Daliesque alternate universe inhabited by exotic brunettes, fast cars and melting clocks. Only in this case, the ad can be folded out to hundreds of pages and the reader can actually live a little of the fantasy both online and, even, offline.

But it goes beyond the individual’s experience, the solitary pleasure of reading a magazine. What is amazing about this multi-ad campaign is its synchronization with the blogosphere’s collectivist approach to information gathering, its unique ability to piece together a narrative. This is an ad campaign that is best experienced with others.

An interesting aside for bloggers — this is the biggest single blogad campaign yet, representing as much revenue for bloggers as the entire Q1 of 2004. (Don’t worry, with total US ad spending at $250 billion, there’s still plenty more growth ahead.)

Some broader context: I drank the blog CoolAid nearly four years ago late one Thursday afternoon, but am more convinced every day that something fundamental is happening here that exceeds our current rational understanding of community and social engineering. The point isn’t the individual blogger. It’s the collective, known to friends and enemies as the blogosphere, wired together at the speed of light for the first time in history.

Folks are repeatedly amazed that these “disorganized” “unemployed” “biased” “untrained” bloggers are regularly thrashing corporate media at its own game. (Need more fuel? See Ed Morrissey’s scoop that has set maple leafs aflutter and CampusJ’s upending of a NYT story.)

The fact is that top-down organizations are vastly overrated and don’t stand a chance about organically evolved multi-party collaborations. The best MIT engineers have never come close to building a structure as elegant and efficient as the hive that 10,000 bees, with an average IQ of 22 and no boss giving directions, can build together in a week. Why doubt the enormity of the hive that 10,000 humans, with an average IQ of 125 and empowered with some new tools, can imagufacture together? What are Google’s 10,000 servers compared with the collaborative mind-power of 10,000 humans, each with at least 100 billion neurons?

Blog advertising got some nice mentions in the press earlier this month that I didn’t highlight. The WSJ included a nice graph of some data we provided and this overview:

For bigger advertisers, finding the right blog is critical, which is where Blogads.com comes in. Blogs that have been in existence for at least six months and have a dedicated readership can join Blogads.com’s database, which currently lists about 750 sites. Advertisers use Blogads.com to find blogs with suitable content (technology, media, fashion) or political slant. They can purchase ads through Blogads.com by the week or the month. Prices range from $10 to $3,000 for better-known blogs. Marketers can chose which sites to advertise on and bloggers can accept or reject the ads.

Henry Copeland, Blogads.com’s founder, works with marketers to create successful blog ads, which he says should be different from regular Web ads. “We just kind of shudder when we hear from an advertiser, ‘Wow, I hear blogs are cool and cheap, and I want to be on a blog,’ ” he says.

Instead, he advises advertisers to think like bloggers, and remember they are joining an ongoing conversation, incorporate links to other sites and use a voice that fits the blog’s general tone. Above all, he says, they should stop hitting readers over the head with giant logos. One good example he points to is an ad that Knopf, a publishing division of Bertelsmann AG’s Random House, designed for Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s most recent book. Rather than linking to a site that sells the book, Knopf’s ad joins in the spirit of blogging by quoting and linking to other blogs that discuss the book, such as MetaFilter.

And here’s what Aline Vandyun wrote the Financial Times on March 28:

If all goes according to plan, more than 1m Americans will soon be gripped
by the mystery of the missing car. The hunt for a stolen Audi A3 - a sporty
hatchback that will hit US showrooms in May - will begin next week with a
launch party in New York.

At the event, the thriller’s first scenes will be shot, with pictures and
clues about the theft then distributed on the internet. From there,
participants in the chase will use interactive tools to choose alternative
plot endings.

How will the publicity be generated? With the latest weapon in the ad man’s
arsenal - blog advertising.

Blogs, web logs or journals, which cover topics from politics to parenting,
have such enormous followings that marketing and advertising executives can
no longer resist advertising in them.

The most recent Pew Internet and American Life Project, which researches
internet use, found that 7 per cent of the 120m US adults who use the
internet have created their own blog. Assuming one blog per person, this
comes to 8m US blogs alone. The study also found that 27 per cent of US
internet users say they read blogs.

“It’s a brand new space, but when you get the right kind of messaging in
it, the results can be astonishing,” said Brian Clark, who has bought blog
ads for agencies Weiden+Kennedy and McKinney-Silver, including for the Audi
campaign.

Blog advertising came into its own during last year’s presidential
election. For the first time, political parties had budgets and strategies
for online advertising. Recognising this, bloggers sold space on their
sites.

“Blogs themselves have started to realise the potential for blog ads and
much more space has become available,” said Michael Bassik, director at
Malchow Schlackman Hoppey & Cooper, which ran John Kerry’s online
presidential campaign.

He admits that a year ago he dismissed the idea of blog advertising. Now,
he has clients spending up to Dollars 15,000 per week on blogs. “You are
reaching a very actively engaged group of people, much more so than readers
of more general web sites,” he said.

Large companies such as Sony and Amazon have advertised on blogs, and the
likes of Nike and GE are also experimenting with the medium.

For bloggers, selling ads provides income to support their hobby or even
helps them make a living.

Blog ads are cheap compared with other forms of advertising. Blogads.com,
where ad buyers can take space on blogs, lists its most expensive placement
at Dollars 3,000.

This buys you a week in the top slot on dailykos.com, which claims to be
read daily by more than 400,000 “committed progressive activists”.

Demand this year has been higher than expected.

“March blog ad sales will exceed our best month last year,” says Henry
Copeland, director of Blogads.com. “We thought it would be the end of 2005
before we got back to (presidential) election levels.”

The United Church of Christ, a protestant church with about 1.3m members,
became aware of bloggers after two television networks, NBC and CBS,
refused to run a UCC commercial showing a gay couple trying to enter a
church.

“We were impressed by the power of the blogs,” said Robert Chase, director
of communications at the UCC. “We decided to include blog advertising in
our next round of commercials. We have had such a great return that we will
now always consider blogs in any campaign.”

UCC spent Dollars 1m on cable televison ads and Dollars 15,000 on the blog
campaign. With about 74,000 clicks so far (the ads run until the end of
March), the cost per viewing of the ad was about 20 cents, Mr Chase said.

Blog ads clearly generate interest, but users say the ads work best if they
engage the reader. “In the blog sphere, a standard, loud ad is the
equivalent of yelling at a cocktail party,” said Mr Clark. “The ads need to
be designed so that the bloggers are part of the conversation.”

It is not yet clear if big advertisers will go beyond small-scale campaigns
and make blogs a regular part of their marketing strategies.

“It is still not for everyone, but it can, at the moment, work for
specially targeted ads,” says Alycia Hise, account director at TMP
Worldwide, which buys blog ads for her education clients.

In the meantime, bloggers should look out for a missing car.

The Audi campaign chase is about getting bloggers to think of an A3 next
time they want to buy a car. Not so different to other ads, after all.

One of my favorite advertisers just sent this note:

Okay, no one is ever going to understand this, but after reading this guy’s description of his site in your interface I’m going to have to buy ads on him now. Just fucking love subversives: his copy writing skills with the below make a $20 2 week slot the equivalent of tipping a clever panhandler.

The Decadent West
The Decadent West is the most visited weblog on the planet, attracting over 1,000,000,000,000 visitors a second. Fucking amazing, isn’t it? Just ignore that other number to your right. It’s completely incorrect. OK? Just remember: 1,000,000,000,000 visitors a second. If only 1% of these people click on your ad, and only 1% of them purchase your wares, you will be rich. Easy money, my friends. Easy money.

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