Seeping into DC

Bara Vaida wrote a great “state of K street and blogs” article in yesterday’s National Journal. Seeking to simplify for folks there, she summed up the incredible value blogs represent relative to traditional media.

When it comes to advertising, blogs are cheap in comparison with mainstream media. The cost of placing a prominently displayed ad on all 133 of the most popular liberal blogs for four weeks runs about $100,000, says Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads, a company specializing in Web-site advertising. In comparison, The New York Times charges $142,083 for a one-day, full-page, black-and-white print ad. The Internet also provides the potential to track how many people react to an ad, known as the ‘click-through’ rate. The number of people who see broadcast or print ads is harder to measure.

Yesterday I participated in the release of IPDI’s giant survey of political influentials. (The subset of politically active folks and influentials.) Blogads sponsored the study, along with Yahoo, MSHC and others. Beside being a 45 megabyte brick of data encompassing hot button issues, magazine subscriptions, shampoo preferences, friendship patterns, favorite sports and everything else in massive appended datasets. We’ll be excavating the blog-specific questions in coming days.