The first two ads of November 3 are for absinthe and RightWingStuff.

At 2.17AM EST, Megan McArdle asked: “I’m wondering about all this coverage — who’s still up watching it? I have to be; it’s my job to watch it. But are ordinary citizens still awake right now?”

Here’s the answer: using our servers as a proxy for traffic on the most popular blogs, everyone but Megan, Europeans and insomiacs was asleep. Marked in CST, here’s the final graph for the day on one of our servers:

Comparing the map in 2000 with 2004, it looks like the comparison with Verdun — huge expenditure for minute territory shifts — is apt.

Yep, that looks like 1600 CET was the blog traffic high for today (and this year?)

Earlier than I expected, and 20% lower than I feared. Whew. For now, I’m going to get a glass of red wine and a book.

Update: forget the book. I’m watching this CSpan page and this great CNN page. (Click on the state and then click on the county… you can drill right down.)

As I told CBS Marketwatcher Frank Barnako yesterday: this is an “alt-tab election“… certainly for me at least.

WSJ: “With traditional media outlets playing it safe about calling election results this year, Web logs — or blogs — have taken over, reporting everything from voting-booth stories to early exit polls and state results.”

Looks like we peaked, at least for now, about an hour ago, 1600 CET

A couple of hours ago, I thought traffic on blogs selling blogads had peaked for the morning, but it looks like we’re still grinding higher. I thought we’d have a mid-day lull. Maybe not.

My bet for the peak of blog traffic today is 10PM EST.

In case you are wondering, the traffic above is on one of our 15 servers doing various Blogads tasks. Nine months ago we had one; a month ago we had six. I hope 15 is too many.

Today’s NYT op/ed page: “Every four years, by journalistic if not political tradition, the presidential election must be accompanied by a ‘revolution.’ So what transformed politics this time around? The rise of the Web log, or blog. The commentary of bloggers – individuals or groups posting daily, hourly or second-by-second observations of and opinions on the campaign on their own Web sites – helped shape the 2004 race.”

Wow. That’s an earlier concession speach than I expected. We won.

(Update: here’s another article from today’s Times: “Despite their partisan nature, [blogs] became a source of information for many political aficionados, in many cases at the expense of the traditional media, said Nick Hahn, managing director at Vivaldi Partners in New York, a strategy, marketing and brand consulting company. ‘The blogs don’t market themselves,’ Mr. Hahn said. ‘People self-select the blogs they read.’ For that reason, they may be particularly effective ways to reach younger consumers, who often dislike having products sold to them but enjoy feeling that they have discovered something for themselves.”

It’s a rout!

Two journalists have asked me several questions in common in recent days “aren’t blogs just niche publications that will never get big?” and “what happens to blog advertising after the election is over?”

Since these seem to be in the water, here are my thoughts:

There are 300 million Americans. Consider what Reed’s law means when you apply it to 300 million people. Basically, there are trillions of trillions of combinations of people (aka unserved niches) within that 300 million people.

Those niches are unserved (vis information and intra-niche communications) because traditional media economics — the cost of building a printing press, hiring trucks, chopping down trees, paying for the CEO and her secretary and her nephew in ad sales, paying the shareholders — made it economically impossible.

But now blogging and it’s appendages have lowered the bar radically for creating and serving info markets.

What’s next for blogads? Although some cool advertisers — more than ever in fact — are in the pipeline (like today’s Bill Murray ad!), after the election we’ll undoubtedly see a big drop in political advertising as candidates disappear and political causes catch a breather and regroup. And for a time, other advertisers may focus less on blogs, at least until the next unprecedented event pushes blogs back into the spot-light as THE revolutionary media of the 21st century.

In any case, relative to today’s fortissimo, political ad volume in coming days weeks may seem pianissimo. Don’t freak. Averaging out the daily shouts and whispers, the long-term trend for blog advertising is still in a sharp crescendo.

www.electoral-vote.com reveals himself as Andrew Tanenbaum, an American comp-sci professor in Amsterdam. With some outrageous ideas and programming and blogads on 90 blogs and some college newspapers, his traffic has grown to 700,000 page impressions a day in roughly 2 months. I’ve corresponded with Prof. Tanenbaum, but until today didn’t know who he was. Isn’t the Internet wonderful… one brilliant citizen can build an astonishing service and, by tapping into nature’s second-best network after the brain, reach millions of people in a matter of weeks?

CNET does a wrap of blogs’ political influence. “It is on the quick-shifting pages of the political blogs that the real pulse of the campaign can be felt,” write John Borland. The past year’s growth of political blogs is a template for lots of other niches, folks.

My favorite actor, Bill Murray, is appearing in blogads promoting the new trailer for his Jacques Cousteau movie Team Zissou. I’m there.

Dan Gillmor posts a hack’s e-mail promoting a company’s service to “manage bloggers,” which Dan’ readers vitriolically deconstruct.

Emmanuelle’s new LA wheelz.

Beth Kirsch, who the big blogads order from Audible.com, blogs about what blogs mean for her company. She concludes: “the combination of niche and buzz marketing supported by blog ads is powerful.” Beth pulled together Audible colleagues and developped a truly snarky set of ads. As the husband of a new iPod owner — ask me how to derail your wife’s iPod to Korean! — I’ve just signed up for Audible.com.

Marketing guru BL Ochman, sums up sums up blog advertising at MarketingProfs.com, as “a good (if scary) buy for advertisers.”

Great lede about blog advertising: “The odds of making a living by writing a blog are a lot like the odds of a garage band turning out a hit album: It can happen, but you better enjoy the music and hang on to your day job in the meantime.” Lou Dilanar goes on give a complete run-down on blogads in Newsday today.

Some very kind words about us: “the economics of blogging have shifted rapidly, thanks to a simple but brilliant idea called Blogads, which allows bloggers to outsource the equivalent of a newspaper’s business and advertising departments, and focus solely on writing. You report! You decide! Blogads sends check!”

And more blog demonizing in the NYT: “If the Internet has been the source of vicious blogs and half-baked rumors, it has also often been a worthy watchdog on the mainstream media, a direct route to the candidates’ records and official Web sites and a means of instantly checking their half-truths and evasions through nonpartisan outlets like FactCheck.org at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center.”

We added six new servers last week getting ready for next week’s traffic, which I assume will at least double anything we’ve seen previously. Unfortunately, our mechanism for refreshing ads on these various servers did not scale up. Until we can rejig the ad propagation routine, ad updating may be delayed by minutes or hours. I apologize for the shortfall. Feel free to give advice or complain in comments below, or e-mail info@ with questions.