Blogvertising

From Clive Thompson, 2006:

For advertisers, the whole lure of blogs is that they’re cheaper than regular newspapers and TV. Plus, blogs offer tightly focused niches, which advertisers love. “You wanna reach New York, you buy on Gothamist. You want to reach mommies, you buy on Busy Mom. How does traditional media match that?” asks Brian Clark, an ad buyer who orchestrated Audi’s blogvertising last year. The Audi campaign—which ran online for three months, and got 68 million page views, and cost only $50,000—was cheap compared with the $500,000 for a Yahoo front-page banner that runs for only one day. . . .

Perhaps more important, blogs are buzz-creation machines: If an ad campaign appears on the blogs, it’ll often become a subject of conversation among the bloggers. “They’re social connectors,” Bassik says. Yet each blog has a different sphere of influence. To get a message out widely, he’ll buy on Daily Kos because it has the largest readership of any liberal blog (though it’s also the most expensive, at $4,000 a week). If Bassik needs click-throughs—someone who’ll click on a candidate’s ad, visit his site, and perhaps make a donation—he might buy Talking Points Memo instead, which has a smaller audience but a much higher click-through rate.

Since blogs set their own ad rates, each one offers a different value proposition, [Henry] Copeland [founder of Blogads] explains. A gossip blog like Perez Hilton has a huge readership—220,000 page views daily—but since the audience is broadly based, the rates are very low, costing $202 to run an ad for one week. Meanwhile, a smaller blog might have only 10,000 visitors daily—but if it’s a lucrative, tightly focused niche, the blogger could charge much higher rates per visitor.