My NMS colleague Simon Owens’ latest PBS MediaShift column takes on the state of online political advertising in the “double whammy” for bloggers and ad brokers in an off-year for politics that happens to be occurring in the middle of a recession. Here he talks to Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads and a friend of Blog P.I.:
“Everyone looks at the numbers and says, ‘Wow, advertising is growing 20 percent a year online,’ and they get really excited about that,” he said. “But most of that growth is cost-per-click — it’s Google, it’s AdWords, it’s AdSense. So display advertising stopped growing a year ago, and the problem is the number of impressions online doubles roughly every year, and so you have this gigantic overhang of supply, and demand has not only stopped growing anyway but is also definitely down in a commercial sense. Put it all together and it’s kind of a perfect storm.”
I asked him whether the Democratic administration and the billions of dollars in increased government spending were providing any new markets for ad buys. He wouldn’t discuss the specifics but confirmed that they were seeing some strong pockets of interests in affected industries and interest groups.
The closing of Pajamas Media, Copeland said, was definitely good for Blogads. When the conservative network launched, it managed to swipe several major conservative bloggers, leaving only a handful of the larger ones behind. Copeland told me that, starting in April, conservative blogger Michelle Malkin will be returning to Blogads.
Indeed michellemalkin.com is back from Pajamas Media. Of two display slots on her site, one ad is running in the $450/week slot, though the $1,500 premium slot remains unfilled. However, this pattern could be seen long before the recession hit, and it’s always been my suspicion that the premium account is meant to sticker-shock buyers into believing the lower slot a bargain, while making the occasional big score from a flush-with-cash advertiser buying out the category.
I digress.
The Malkin-owned Hot Air however is not coming back to Blogads, not yet if at all. That site is running Google display ads as well as ads from Intermarkets, which handles Drudge Report and a few other political sites with less-Niagaran traffic.
Also quoted in Owens’ column is Chris Bowers of Open Left, who also goes through Blogads. Here’s what ad column on his site looked like on Friday:
I say that because as of Saturday afternoon, they’ve thrown a display ad that wasn’t in there before. Those displays can’t be bringing in a great deal of money. I’ll bet more than anything they’re running just to keep up the appearance of healthy advertising, and hopefully lure other advertisers into the column.
Meanwhile back on Bowers’ former site, MyDD, Jerome Armstrong is keeping the lights on with Google ads, Jane Hamsher’s CommonSense Media and something I’ve never heard of called Pulse 360 that nonetheless has an impressive network. Its Blogads slot remains on the site, unfilled. Two years ago, that would have been unthinkable. At Daily Kos, long one of Blogads’ top earners, Markos Moulitsas has had a diversified pool of ads for some time; today premium Blogads slot is unfilled, one flash-based display ad occupies the (almost-identically placed) lower slot, and just one traditional Blogad (JPG/GIF + a few lines of text) is running (pictured at right). That’s Markos Moulitsas’ latest book, as if you needed me to tell you that. I presume that Daily Kos today is earning significantly less than its election-season peak.
What about Blog P.I.? I haven’t sold a Blogads slot in months, but then again, I almost never do. My traffic may be better than Michael “Heckuva Job” Brownie’s, but I consistently rank near or at the bottom of the Political Insiders Advertising Network. What can I say? I write for a very niche audience when I have the time and inspiration. That’s no way to build an audience, and consequently no way to build an advertising base.
I wonder if this slowdown and possible leveling-off of blogging as a business could bring back some of the amateurism of the blogosphere — a tradition Blog P.I. upholds proudly, if occasionally, at least until someone is willing to pay me to do this (though I am grateful to NMS for hosting this site). Until that time, I’d like to see an ascendance of long-form blogging from experts. More analysis, less attitude. More Ed Feltens and fewer Duncan Blacks.
This is an especially good time for it, as back-and-forth discussions and quick-hit commentary is already moving to Twitter. Of course we’ll need someone to pick out the best stuff, like Memeorandum but with an eye for quality. Just as Silicon Alley Insider suggested yesterday, a curator’s approach to content could be where editing as a profession is going.
Of course, for that you need money too, and money will be scarce over the coming year, which is why I think we will see less blogging for dollars and more blogging for ideas. It will be painful for many, and already has if you consider Gawker’s contraction. But it might be a worthwhile thinning of the herd. And there will be plenty of time to blog for dollars when the Dow is back over 10,000.
Everything in Moderation: A Closer Look at Comment Spam
At my ever more occasionally updated personal blog, I’ve long published a series of posts called “Great Spams of the Internet” wherein I highlight a particularly amusing bit of e-mail spam and even the occasional e-mail interaction. Once when a 419 scammer tried to get me to call him on the telephone, I replied:
He was very understanding, writing back the next day:
At least I think he understood. In any case, this is the long way around getting to my real point.
As you may know, I run a blog here. As you can probably guess, I get my share of spam comments; most are caught by the Akismet plug-in for WordPress. But then, most are fully automated and advertise prescription drugs, gambling websites or sex acts that would probably boost my unique visitor counts if I mentioned them, but I don’t need that kind of traffic.
However, a small percentage of it manages to evade Akismet’s filters and find its way into my moderation queue. In some cases, they are only barely distinguishable from real comments. In some cases not listed here, I’ve approved comments that I am sure were intended only to improve the SEO of the website linked, but were interesting enough to allow through on their own merits.
Most are not, but this doesn’t mean they’re entirely without value. Some of them are clever, some are just amusing. I’ve been holding onto a few of them to discuss here, so let’s open up the queue, if for no other reason than now I can finally delete them:
Here, somebody is pushing what appears to be a YouTube clone, even using a joking nickname YouTube acquired once the site itself was acquired by Google. In fact, the site turns out to be a combination of Google’s input forms. Though the IP address indeed traces back to the United Kingdom, the author is not especially concerned with proper English spelling or punctuation. They also have no system for keeping track of which websites they have already hit, or they just don’t care. I’m leaning toward the latter.
Here is one that, at first glance, looks like a genuine comment: This was intended for a post that mentioned Ron Paul, just as the one above tried attaching itself to a post discussing Google and YouTube. But if you follow the link, it goes to a blog whose posts consist of only of one YouTube video and sometimes-relevant text copied from other websites — “scraped” as it’s called. And there’s a good reason why it sounds like a real comment: It was scraped from another comment from the same thread.
This one promotes yet another inscrutable blog, this time in a foreign language that I presume to be Turkish. I guess this because the IP address resolves to Izmir, Turkey. The one above resolves to Istanbul, Turkey. The two cities are not close by, so they are probably not the same person. But if Turkey is a hotbed of comment spam, that’s news to me.
Undoubtedly, this one is my favorite. Like the Wikipedia vandal whose edit summary consisted of “Blanked the page” or the panhandler who admits he needs the money for booze, “Sohbet” is admirably honest about his intentions. I might even consider throwing him a link, except that the website no longer exists — less than a month after he was trying to extract Google juice/build traffic for it. Also of note: the IP address resolves to Antalya, Turkey. Still, if Turkish comment spam is a known phenomenon, I can’t find any discussion about it.
Funny at first, but tedious. I get a lot of these, and it’s kind of similar to another common tactic I’ll get to in just a bit. Flattery will get you everywhere with some people, but not me. Also, the linked site is in Russian. Russian spam at least I am familiar with.
Better than YouTube! Quite a claim. Surprisingly, the website is well-designed, coherent and legitimate. For someone who just wanted to find videos related to a presidential or prospective VP candidate, it might actually be better than YouTube. So here we can start to draw a clear distinction: Some spam comment campaigns aim to promote fake websites that seek ad revenue or to promote another website. Others are spammy promotions for real websites; it’s very possible the creators of this website don’t know exactly what their SEO is up to. But I’m not particularly offended by this comment. It doesn’t add to the conversation so I won’t approve it, but it got the general subject matter of this website correct, it’s vaguely conversational, and it doesn’t represent itself as anything other than what it is: a pitch.
Lastly, this one I’m including not because it’s compelling, but because it’s so common. Also, because it represents the dishonest counterpoint to the previous example. Here, the commenter announces enthusiasm for the targeted website (in this case mine), then immediately starts pitching another website. Notice that his subject matter is completely off-base with what Blog P.I. is about. The targeted post — which I wrote in July, 2006 — included exactly one use of the word “wedding,” in a throwaway reference to New York Times announcements page thereof.
Predictably, the website being promoted is commercial in nature, but doesn’t offer anything for sale itself. What it does, though, is link to pages on a real wedding supply website, which presumably hired the spammer to boost their search engine ranking. A bit of rudimentary sleuthing reveals the SEO’s identity and company; he’s using his real name (which is something, I guess) and he didn’t even register the URL anonymously.
But I’m not going to single him out with a link or textual mention that could turn up in a search engine. He’s not doing anything illegal and, as noted above, similar practices are exceedingly common. I’ve been a critic of certain SEO practices, but I’m fascinated by also them, and clearly I think some tactics are better than others. The way I see it, if you’re going to do black hat SEO, why not do it with some style?
Also, the joke is on them: Every link in my comment section is automatically assigned a nofollow attribute.