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Interview: Henry Copeland, BlogAds

Beltway Blogroll: Tell me about the market for advocacy ads on blogs and how it has grown since you started the company.

Henry Copeland: We opened for business in August 2002, and I thought we'd have an instant boom. Doesn't every blogger want to make money? Doesn't every advertiser see how dynamic and influential the blogs are? Well, no. So we had total sales in '02 of probably $500. This was quite a disappointment since we'd put 2,000 man-hours into developing the idea and our share of sales was only $100. Worse, 2003 was almost as slow. In retrospect, all the t-shirt sales -- pro or anti-Bush, pro-second-Amendment or pro-choice -- should have shown me that we did have a core audience of passionate partisans, but selling $30 worth of ads day after day was disheartening.

In June of 2003, the ACLU of Pennsylvania bought what I recall as the first advocacy ad on Atrios, who was the first "big" political blogger to join BlogAds. I almost fell out of my seat when I saw a $900 payment come through for a one-year ad. I thought, "Maybe we do have a business here after all." Wow, what a deal he got because today obviously $900 would buy you just a week or two on Atrios. (I should note, too, that Atrios' traffic has grown 50-fold.)

The next advocacy ad I recall was Oceana.org, which bought a couple ads in the fall of '03. When I was next in D.C., I visited Matt Littlejohn at Oceana to thank him for his business and ask how the ads had done. He said, "Well, the guy we hired to run online advocacy came through the blogads." That was another hint that we had a business. The next eye-opener was when Mark Nickolas bought ads for [now-Rep. Ben] Chandler's Kentucky special election and got a 40-fold return on the buy. Bit by bit, these data points have accumulated, to the point we think we do have a business.

BB: You mentioned earlier this year that you expected a real explosion in such ads come September. Did that happen? Why or why not?

HC: Yes, September, October and November were strong. The big surpise was the volume of local stuff we did -- for example on California blogs. Issue 77, "nix the first six," Proposition 79, PombointheirPocket.org -- you name it, we ran the ads.

BB: How would you describe the typical buyer of such ads? Corporation? Trade/interest group? Campaign? PAC?

HC: The data set is still too noisy to say "typical." At the end of quarters and in the quarter before an Election Day, campaigns are a major buyer. At a steadier pace, we've got the issues-focused buyers: BSA, Amnesty International, Pro-Alito, NARAL, the U.N. Foundation, Keep the Ten Commandments, anti-Wal-Mart, anti-drug importation, you name it. Blogads are a ticker tape of the political zeitgeist. Here is a smart example of this type of a blog ad and landing page.

Most of the current ad flow is what you might call B2C, which is to say retail politics. I think we're going to see a lot more D.C.-to-D.C. advertising in '06. People sat up and took notice when they heard Senator [John] Cornyn, a 50-something Republican from Texas who is not your stereotypical hipster geek, begin his questioning of [now-Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts by saying that Cornyn had stayed up the night before reading the blogs to see what they were saying about him. Then Cornyn proceeded to ask Roberts a question that a blogger had mooted.

The blogs' combination of undiluted minutia, unvarnished opinion, name-naming and tomorrow's-news-today are a magnet, not only for voters but insiders. So some D.C. player will buy the top slot on Political Wire or TalkLeft or Right Wing News for $100,000 for all of '06, and a couple of years from now, that deal will look as cheap in retrospect as the $900-for-a-year order on Atrios in '03.

BB: What is the typical ad buy? How many blogs? What price?

HC: In politics, the lower end is $1,000 on 1-10 blogs, and the top is $30,000 on 200 blogs, with the median being $8000 on 50-100 blogs.

BB: Which blogs are the most popular among advertisers, and why?

HC: Well, we've beer drinkers, wine drinkers, Coke drinkers and Perrier drinkers, and a few folks who like champagne. But the big-name political blogs are the easiest thing to buy because these are the ones that everyone knows. The client can name-drop at a dinner party and everyone will know what she's talking about. "Wow, you bought Kos, Hewitt, TPM and Power Line -- what a tantalizing mix." But some of the best values are in the small, narrow-focus blogs, where you can hit exactly your audience and get more attention.

BB: How is the blog market different than print, TV or even the Web in general? Who are advertisers likely to reach, and why do they want to reach them?

HC: Great question, one we're constantly thinking about. The first thing is the concentration of the audience. This is 200-proof, pure-fermented politics. Political blog readers aren't casual browsers who happened to stumble through on their way to the sports pages. The second distinction: Versus TV and print, these are interactive audiences; readers can click or they can send an e-mail or they can post a comment.

Most importantly, blogs are nodes in fast-transmitting social networks. Twenty percent of blog readers are themselves bloggers, so messages ripple further and faster in these communities than in other online audiences. Finally, there's an overlooked offline component to the blogosphere. Blog readers are, 90 percent of the time, knowledge workers on broadband connections. They are at work in a physical social network. And so, in contrast to TV and newspapers, which are consumed in a vacuum, blog readers are far more likely to shout out to the person in the next cubicle, or gab about something at the water cooler, or blast an e-mail to 50 friends and colleagues.

All of which means that the most successful blogads are a notch more social and engaging than the ads you'd put in print. The ads may link to some piece of viral video or contain multiple links to blogger comments, white papers, action pages. The creative may change a couple of times a week to keep the audience clicking. The creative may change to react to blogger comments on the original message.

A final caveat: There are no free lunches. Because these are "influentials," in the classic Roper sense, you have to remember that these folks are more demanding, pickier and less likely to just buy what you put in front of them.

BB: What kind of return on investment can advocacy advertisers expect from blogs?

HC: There's no single measure of ROI. The easiest to quantify are money or petition signatures. Depending on your ad and audience choice, you can strongly outperform other online media and make a multiple on your investment, or you can at least equal the other media and/or break even on the buy. Some buyers just want to know they've made physical contact with 2,000 visitors or that their ad has been seen by 200,000 people who might care about an issue. Some just want to plant a seed of an idea in the heads of 10 insiders. Some folks measure success in terms of a single call from a
congressional staffer saying, "Hey, I saw your ad on Althouse or Politics1."

Posted by | 09:20 AM

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