Check out all the different Blogads versions run on DailyKos.com by Jeff Reifman for CommonTimes.org. Jeff writes: “Basically, we found that customizing the ad content to the site we were advertising on wasn’t enough. We needed something catchy, unique and at times – in your face.” The larger lesson is that experimentation is key. The end result: “we generated more than 28,690 click throughs from 2,833,573 DailyKos page views…”

You can see past examples of “open source blogads results/advice” here and here.

Aggregate advertising data for 2005. Just give blogs .1% baby!

Nick Denton offers tips for startups.

Jason Calicanis gets wired.

My predictions for ’06? At least three of the following six outliers will occur:

Stock volatility index VIX (currently 11.6) hits 40.

Jason Calicanis bolts AOL for greener pastures.

Pajamas Media launches weekly print magazine and cable TV show.

Oil passes $75 a barrel.

Yields on 10 year notes rise from 4.3% to 5.5%.

NYT (currently $27.5) trades below $20.

Sploid surpasses 5 million impressions a month. (Currently 250,000.)

The upfront market for TV ads implodes.

Narnia: resurrected by witch, faun, Lucy.

IMAX 3D Polar Express: astonishing scifi and gold-plated kitsch.

(Christian-motifs notwithstanding, I have trouble seeing how Narnia’s rampant animism/paganism fills churches, though.)

Just moved in last week. Feeling agoraphobic, we’ve set up in the “back” office, but will expand into the bigger space when tables (formerly in a local Chinese restaurant) get situated.

Closer view of the back office, which we’ll stuff with an old green couch and lunch table.

Looking forward from the entrance.

An advertiser on DailyKos accelerates into traditional retailing.

Ryan lives in the boonies outside Kansas City, a member of the Osage tribe. He worked as a carpenter, helped his tribe’s language department record their dying language, and built his t-shirt business on the side. Eventually, he saved enough money to buy a dKos ad (they’re not cheap). Sales took off.

Now, Ryan’s T-shirts may be picked up by Urban Outfitters.

And Audi’s audacious campaign for the A3, promoted by a sophisticated layering of BlogAds, got ink in Business Week as one of six 2005 Online Marketing Pacesetters. As you’ll recall, with less than .5% of the campaign’s total budget, BlogAds generated 29% of total results. Call Brian Clark if you want to buy some of the secret sauce.

I apologize for the admin server’s slowness today.

The bad news (and good news) is that we’ve had an unprecedented number of large orders today (surpassing our weekly average over the last six months) and the admin hamsters are gasping. More ads to come tomorrow apparently.

The undiluted good news is that Blogads 3.0 is finally in preliminary testing stages. Not sure what that means vis a vis deployment, but after more than a year of gestation, it is great to finally feel some contractions. In addition to making the admin server far swifter and robust, the new code will enable a bunch of features advertisers have begged for for AND allow for faster extensions.

A surprising number of friends emailed that they’d heard me in Robert Smith’s NPR radio piece about “the new blog networks” on Thursday.

Smith focused on Pajamas Media, but gave Blogads a short mention. As a former journalist, I chuckled listening as Smith, who has to boil things down for a mass audience, couldn’t dig into the unique stuff — PJ’s mauling by the very blogosphere it seeks to tame (see Dennis, Ann, HogonIce, and this guy) — and settled for the “news” that someone hired 70 bloggers and hopes to sell ads to Volvo. (Selling blogads since August ’02, Blogads collaborates with 900-odd blogs; Gawker owns two dozen; WeblogsInc employs 70 31; and brands like Audi, Sony, Turner, Volvo, Chrysler, Citrix, Nokia, WSJ, Road Runner, Random House, Budget Renta Car, Apple, Levis have been advertising on blogs for nearly two years.)

As for Smith’s framing metaphor, that “blog networks” resemble early TV and radio networks, I’m wagering the outcome is lots more social, fluid AND effective. Anyway, such is mass-market journalism.

As he dons his padjamas, Glenn Reynolds posted some kind words about Blogads, “a great boon to bloggers.” With competitors like this, who needs friends? Ahum. We do! So thank you especially to bloggers who are hewing to our weird and sometimes wonderful experiment in commercial collaboration. Lots more weirdness to come in ’06.

Speaking of which, we had a small party in our new office last night and should be moving in next week. Once settled in January, we’ll be hiring another one or two ad shepherds, with a new programmer on the way too. Maybe some pictures here next week.

It was great to see two of our smartest advertisers mentioned in the New York Times this weekend.

First, B.L. Ochman’s genius blog treasure hunt for Budget Renta Car got good coverage from Stuart Elliott in the Times. Some great metrics and good mention for blogads sellers BuzzMachine, Jossip, Largehearted Boy, Overheard in New York, Stereogum, The Superficial, Blurbomat, CityRag, Coolfer, Daily Heights, DCist, Gothamist, IndieWire and This Is Broken. Turns out Blogads handled all but two of the blogs Budget advertised on. (I was disappointed that Budget and its agency failed to give Ochman and her partner in crime Komra Moriko credit for generating the idea and driving all the creative.) You can see the various ads and clickthrus www.upyourbudget.com/ads

Then Brian Clark’s Audi A3 Heist blogads got a nice mention in a scattershot story about the commercialization of the blogosphere.

Audi, for example, paid for about 70 million ads about its A3 compact model on 286 Web logs in the spring. Many of the blog ads featured links to other blogs that mentioned Audi’s campaign for the A3, not to Audi’s site, said Brian Clark, chief executive of GMD Studios, an experimental media firm that worked with Audi’s advertising agency to create the campaign.

“It was a substantial buy, and it was a really effective buy for the campaign in terms of the response,” Mr. Clark said. “You find that blogs are these series of citational records of what bloggers read. People with blogs read blogs. You get a feedback cycle.”

Web logs also give advertisers the chance to aim at specific readers. If you want to advertise to New York Mets fans, for example, you can easily find blogs that cater to those readers, Mr. Clark said.

(Odd that Blogads, which handled 283 of the 286 blogs Audi advertised on, didn’t get mentioned while weird affiliate deals on marginal blogs did get highlighted. But you can’t win them all.)

Ken Layne, one of my favorite Internets users, grinds out some great headlines in this week’s Sploid:

Pope bans musicals and apple martinis: Anybody who supports ‘gay culture’ unwelcome in the priesthood
Pardoned turkeys flying first class to Disney: Hunger kills 6M children a year
Secretsanta.com, Idaho: Another idiot town sells its naming rights to another stupid website
Sam, world’s ugliest dog, dead at 14