Atrios explores the link between Congressional elections and blog advertising. He’s right that few candidates will match Chandler’s 50-fold return on blog advertising. He writes: “I do think that there are a lot of campaigns out there who will be able to make Blogs work for them, but it’s going to take a bit more than simply placing ads. If everyone jumps on the ad-placing bandwagon, and then they sit back and wait for the money to roll in, then I’ll get a nice fat check from Blogads but it won’t necessarily do much for the campaigns.” He observers: “The key thing blogs provide is a way to personalize your campaign. Aside from getting the attention of the bloggers themselves, I think ads get a positive reaction from blog readers because they perceive that the campaigns take this seriously. And, then, when they click through the website they want to see something more than just a standard impersonal campaign website which is rarely updated. Nobody thinks that twenty bucks buys them face time with a candidate, but people donate because they think their twenty bucks is being bundled with a hundred other peoples’, and suddenly that makes them part of an interest group which, collectively, wants to feel it’s being heard.”

It’s worth remembering that when Chandler’s campaign manager, Mark Nickolas, originally talked to me about Blogads, he hoped to break even. I secretly thought he could do more than that, but didn’t want to overpromise. The big test for campaigns will be in their willingness to tweak both their ads and their landing pages. Too often, in the bustle of the campaign, ads become frozen in time. Making a new pitch can hit a whole new slice of a blog’s readership.

BTW, a colleague in Budapest sent a translated version of the Wire News article about Chandler’s blogads that had shown up in the newsletter of the Hungarian Információs Társadalom- és Trendkutató Központ. .

Ben Chandler, blog advertiser and Democratic candidate for U.S. Congress, won his special election today in Kentucky. Josh Marshall notes that this was also a victory for Internet fundraising:

As you’ll notice there on the left, the Chandler campaign has been advertising for about the last two weeks on this and a number of other blogs. The campaign budgeted about two grand for blog advertising. And my understanding is that by today they had raised close to $100,000 from contributors who linked through from those blogs on which the campaign was advertising.

In other words, they got roughly a 50-fold turnaround on their investment in the final two weeks of the campaign. And in case you’re wondering one hundred grand is a lot of money in a House race.

Now, obviously that’s exciting news for proprietors of blogs looking to open up revenue streams from advertisers. But the bigger story here is about the Democrats and the Internet, and the way this technology seems to click, shall we say, for the Democratic demographic.

Update: Tongue in cheek, Prof. Reynolds writes that Chandler’s win is “entirely because of the blogads!”

Mike Haines is running in the Democratic primary in Georgia’s 12th district. His campaign staff have bought some blogads to appeal to a national audience for funding. Clicking on a blogad on DailyKos, members of the massive and activist DailyKos community (aka Kossites) have arrived at the Haines blog to critique the ad, offer support and ask for the candidate’s positions on a slew of issues. He’s just responded. Haines’ opponent in the race, John Barrow, has also bought a number of ads on blogs.

Not your grandma’s media, is it?

Welcome to Dean uber blogger Mathew Gross as he returns to private life with his own blog. Matt’s blog will be a magnet for Internet activists, and his blogads are good value. Matt makes an interesting point:

And the amazing thing — the thing I still have yet to see a single pundit get — was that only 600,000 people in a nation of 300 million did that. 600,000 people shook the very foundation of political power in this country. It was an earthquake felt by both parties, the media, and the special interests. That feeling scared the hell out of a lot of people in Washington D.C. But you know what it felt like to the rest of us? It felt like hope.

Amy Keller of Roll Call did a great job earlier this week covering the Chandler campaign‘s use of blogads.

With an investment of only $2,000, and in less than two weeks, the campaign has raked in between $45,000 and $50,000 in contributions from blog readers, and that number is growing every day, said Chandler campaign manager Mark Nickolas.

Chandler ‘ a former state auditor and former state attorney general ‘ is facing off against GOP state Sen. Alice Forgy Kerr in the Feb. 17 special election for the Lexington-area House seat. But while Kerr has outraised Chandler by several hundred thousand dollars ‘ as of late last week, Kerr had raised about $1.2 million and Chandler was estimating his fundraising total at about $650,000 ‘ Chandler’s campaign says its fundraising pace is picking up and at least part of the surge has come from the Web.

‘It has been phenomenal,’ Nickolas said. ‘I get an e-mail every time there’s a contribution ‘ and we know from the e-mail the source is a blog when they come through that avenue. Since the morning of Jan. 29, the FEC [filing] cut-off, I’ve put all those e-mails in a separate file. So far there are 711.’…

Nickolas said the contributions from blog readers are ‘averaging in the $40 to $50 range.’ The vast number of contributions are between $20 and $25, but every so often a $1,000 or $2,000 contribution will pop up to ‘boost the average.’

While Nickolas was initially hoping simply to make back the campaign’s $2,000 investment, the gamble has brought in more than 20 times that amount.

Chandler’s experience seems to reinforce conclusions made by the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, which in a recent report stated that the ‘great promise of online fundraising lies in its low transaction costs,’ enabling political fundraisers to ‘look to average people for funding.’

Indeed, as Chandler’s blog choices demonstrate, while the price of running a campaign ad on a blog varies greatly from one site to another, doing so is uncontestably cost-effective.

‘You can get the premier spot for a lot of these blogs for just $400,’ remarked Nickolas, who consulted with Blogads’ Henry Copeland for advice on where to place his ads.

According to the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet study, the ‘online political citizens’ are ‘dramatically more likely than the general public to donate money to candidates,’ and by the end of 2003, approximately 46 percent of that universe had already donated to a candidate or political organization in the past two to three months. By way of comparison, only 10 percent of the general population has donated to a candidate or political party during the same time period.

The study also found that Democrats tend to be more comfortable giving online, with nearly half of all Democrats ‘ 49 percent ‘ saying they donated online, compared to just 11 percent of Republican donors.

‘The thing about this community is they are educated. They pay attention to politics. They care and they tend to have a little bit more disposable income,’ Nickolas observed. ‘If you can appeal to them, they are more than happy to throw $20, $50 or $100 at you.’ …

Can Chandler’s success during this special election translate into a winning fundraising formula for other campaigns ‘ particularly in a busy campaign season in which dozens upon dozens of candidates are competing for attention?

‘There’s no doubt about it,’ Nickolas said, though he conceded: ‘We’ve been blessed by the fact that we’re the only race out there.’ He said the campaign’s finance director has been inundated with calls from other Democrats in the fundraising arena wanting to know if they can do this in their campaign.

Nickolas is sure of one thing, however: ‘We’ve probably raised the real estate prices on these blogs.’

I’m flying from LA to Chapel Hill today. Look forward to answering a bunch of e-mail and voice-mail tomorrow AM!

Taegan Goddard writes “Blogads are amazing. An update from Chandler’s campaign says they’ve raised more than $40,000 from their ad buy 10 days ago! The Chandler ad is in the left sidebar.”

Glenn Reynolds writes: “BLOGADS seem to work. Despite its taking-in-each-others’-wash overtones, I bought blogads on TalkLeft and BillHobbs.com for my wife’s documentary, Six. The orders have poured in, and the ads, for a month and two weeks respectively, paid for themselves almost overnight. It’s not choking the local post office or anything, but it’s a pretty good response. Meanwhile, PoliticalWire reports that the Chandler for Congress blogad paid for itself in donations the first day. Maybe Henry’s onto something.”

As Glenn is wont to say: blogs are a pack, not a herd. Ignore them at your peril.

I’ll be staying with Matt and Emmanuelle Saturday night in LA and then driving down to San Diego for the O’reilly e-democracy confab. This is late notice… but if you are a blogger in LA and want to come around for lunch Sunday, please drop me a line. Don’t be shy, people.

We’ve had two ten-minute glitches in the last 24 hours with disappearing ad images. These outages have occured on both image servers we run at Interland, so it appears these outages are upstream from our servers.

Our serving strategy has been revised significantly in the last month. Now the ad management and javascript serving is handled by two servers at the most expensive host around, Rackspace, with the images being served from Interland, where bandwidth is cheaper.

This means that if outages occur, the adstrip framework and text will still load and the actual loading of all blog pages will not be degraded.

If anyone is interested in eliminating the risk of brief image outages, we’ll gladly forward a CGI to cache ads on your server. It is simple to install and the cache updates only once a day
or when new ads are added. I know that as numbers grow, a number of bigger bloggers are reconsidering their hosting options, so if you have any tips please pass them along.