The campaign manager for one of the congressional campaigns came back last week to renew some blogads. Afterwards he sent this note:

“Your purchasing engine is extremely easy to use for both the initial purchase and ad updates. I think this is a wonderful system.

Roman Levit
Campaign Manager
Barrow for Congress“

Thomas Friedman visits a company in India that handles work sent from the US. Aren’t you stealing jobs from the US, he asks an an Indian manager?

Well, he answered patiently, “look around this office.” All the computers are from Compaq. The basic software is from Microsoft. The phones are from Lucent. The air-conditioning is by Carrier, and even the bottled water is by Coke, because when it comes to drinking water in India, people want a trusted brand. On top of all this, says Mr. Nagarajan, 90 percent of the shares in 24/7 are owned by U.S. investors. This explains why, although the U.S. has lost some service jobs to India, total exports from U.S. companies to India have grown from $2.5 billion in 1990 to $4.1 billion in 2002. What goes around comes around, and also benefits Americans.

(Via Outside the beltway.)

A profile of Atrios. You can get a great advertising deal & help buy Atrios’ next martini or three here.

In todays WSJ, Mylene Mangalindan takes a detailed look at the resurgence of online advertising, focusing on Mitsubishi, which has done a number of ad campaigns online and is boosting its online spend 50% in 2004 to $6 million. The company “increased spending after each successful Internet campaign by slicing money out of its billboard and print publication budgets.” Now, Mitsubishi’s online ads have cut the company’s “cost per sale — the amount of money spent on advertising divided by the number of cars sold — to one third of the cost of traditional advertising media.”

For you skimmers here’s the point: ONE THIRD. The economics of traditional publishing are disintegrating fast.

Andrew Sullivan needles conservative Protestants for their hypocrisy.

WSJ columnist Lee Gomes: “blogs are becoming an alternative-news universe, giving everyone with a PC and a Web connection access to the sorts of gossip that was once available only to reporters on the press bus… I am, in my private life, a voracious reader of these things, as are most of my friends, reporters included.” (Via Political Wire.)

Looks like our order form is screwy. We’ve been reinforcing the counting mechanisms, which seems to have thrown off the catalog of blogs. Two steps forward, one step back. We’re doing a veritable jig these days. Should be fixed Monday morning.

As safe outlets for Serpico‘s whistleblowing evaporate, his buddy Bob Blair says, “we could even talk to a guy I know at the New York Times.” Today, Serpico would undoubtedly turn to a blogger as his advocate of last resort. (I’d love to see more alternate histories woven with blogs.)

Last night watched a talent show rehearsal. We spent the afternoon playing basketball outside, girls against boys.

This morning, I enjoyed my buddy Steve’s latest post about crafting a table. This is part nine!

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!”