Ha and ah-ha

Matt Welch stumbles on one reason why sponsorships beat pay-per-click models.

Hey everyone, make sure not to click on those GoogleAds about baseball crap over to your left! Wouldn’t want the advertisers to have all you yucky customers on their websites whilst sitting at a computer! Instead, click on the BlogAd about the new documentary film Little Man, which opens in L.A. tonight.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post (happily, no doubt) details the risk of advertising where real people are brainstorming.

Blogads.com makes it into the third sentence of the story. “Kaine’s campaign had purchased the space through a broker that put his advertising on numerous liberal-leaning blogs.” If the ads’ provenance is worth mentioning, why not toss in the name of the “broker,” aka Blogads.com? In the interest of full disclosure, should WPost have mentioned that ads like Kaine’s would have in the past appeared in the pages of Wpost.com, and that this “broker” is poaching hundreds of thousands in ad revenues a year from the august pages of Wpost.com?

If publishers want to flee “upmarket” (ie peddling content in which people can’t think aloud and/or write what they really think) rather than fight blogs on their own turf, great. (Wondering what the heck I’m talking about, read this book.)