From: Anonymous
Sent: Monday, March 15, 2004 2:59 PM
To: Gary S. Gevisser
Subject: Wind for the Nextraterrestrial Sails???
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Blogs
Grow Up: By MARCUS LILLKVIST One of A few weeks before a special election last month, the campaign manager for Kentucky Democrat Ben Chandler bought $2,000 in ads on these Web sites. It was a risky move. Blogs are personal, diary-like Web pages that are usually devoted to a particular topic, and often have a decidedly sharp point of view. While all the rage among Webheads, blogs are largely untested for advertising. In fact, Mark Nickolas, the campaign manager for Rep. Chandler, planned to reimburse the campaign from his own salary if the ads didn't work out. He didn't have to worry: The ads ended up raising nearly $80,000 in contributions, enough to pay for a torrent of TV commercials and newspaper ads that helped propel the candidate to victory. "Thanks to the blog ads, we bought every available spot [on local TV stations] and we still had money left," says Mr. Nickolas. DOW
JONES REPRINTS
The The trend is in its early stages; big advertisers like Coke and Procter & Gamble aren't yet hawking their wares on blogs. Indeed, much of the advertising is found on politically oriented blogs, which are experiencing a spike in readership from the presidential election. Many people wonder if the blog ad boomlet will outlast the election. But other Internet institutions have had similarly modest origins; recall that eBay started out as a place to trade Beanie Babies and Pez dispensers. And it's no surprise that as blogs grow in popularity, they are beginning to attract advertisers. Indeed, the entire Internet has been experiencing an uptick in ad revenue, with advertisers beginning to open their wallets again for the first time since the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000. Typical of the new breed of "bloggerpreneurs" is Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who runs Daily Kos, a liberal political blog. Mr. Moulitsas says he initially wanted to keep his blog ad-free, as a way of preserving his independence. But in December, he had to buy new server computers to keep up with growing traffic, and he started taking ads to pay the bills. Business was so good that in three months he was able to double his ad rates. Now, he's bringing in $4,000 a month. "That is phenomenal to me. I even get some money over to the college fund for my baby," says Mr. Moulitsas. Another popular political blog, TalkingPointsMemo (www.talkingpointsmemo.com1), also began taking ads; now, it brings in more than $5,000 a month, enough for head blogger Joshua Marshall to be able to hire a part-time assistant to help him do research. As with many things about the Internet, precise details about the "blogosphere," as some bloggers call their world, are hard to come by. There are many thousands of blogs, though most of them are read by only a few people. A popular blog, though, can attract more than a million readers a month. One study said that roughly 4% of the 126 million American adults with Internet access report going to blogs for information. Still, blog ads are in their infancy and the operators of these sites face big hurdles in luring more of them, ad experts say. "Over 90% of the business of Internet ads [goes to] 20 large, established news media like nytimes.com and WSJ.com. Honestly, the blogs haven't hit the radar yet," says Stu Ginsberg, public-relations director at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group for Web sites that take ads. Yet the blog ad trend is far enough
along that at least one company has sprung up to serve the market: Pressflex LCC. The "They said nobody would want to advertise on personal
diaries. Even my wife thought I was crazy," recalls Henry Copeland, who
founded the company in 2002. Now, he has three programmers working for him in
On the Web's most popular blogs, the ads are starting to look downright mainstream. Xerox Corp. pitches its printers on Slashdot (slashdot.org2), a site for technology-industry news, and visitors to Drudge Report (www.drudgereport.com3), the news and gossip site, have seen ads for AOL and CNN. Still, only the top blogs can snare ads from mainstream companies. Most others have to content themselves with ads from candidates, with conservatives typically advertising on conservative blogs, and likewise for liberals. Other blog ads are for somewhat
quirky products, such as a CD with humorous Christmas songs sold by Paul Libman, a "I don't think that the bloggers realized how much these ads are worth," he says. "Next year it will be much more expensive." Indeed, the topic of blog ads, and how much they are worth, has become a theme in the discussions that bloggers have about their work on their own blogs. In the early days, bloggers often boasted of how they were a new medium, one quite apart from traditional journalism. But the trend toward commercialization is making some of them grapple with ethical questions that traditional media have been dealing with for decades. One approach is to do what most big newspapers do, and split up advertising and editorial functions. "Since I cover political issues, I never handle inquiries from political campaigns myself," says Mr. Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo. Other bloggers deal with the issue by not accepting ads at all. A few rely on voluntary contributions from readers, often through online-payment services like PayPal. Of course, with so many blogs out there, and with the barrier to creating one low, the vast majority of bloggers will never have the luxury of experiencing Mr. Marshall's ethical problems. "Only very few amateur writers will get big and good enough to make money on this," says Scott Rafer, president of Feedster, a search engine for blogs. Write to Marcus Lillkvist at marcus.lillkvist@wsj.com6
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