Political Ads On Blogs Lean Left And Right

Look at the sidebar of almost any big political blog this month and you will see the 2008 race arriving in miniature: small rectangular ads with a candidate's face, a slogan and a link to a signup page. They are cheap, they are narrow, and they say a great deal about how campaigns now picture their audiences. I have started saving screenshots of them alongside the TV spots in my clip archive, because I suspect we will want a record of how this phase began.

A small format with a short history

Blog advertising as a political tool is barely older than the last presidential cycle. Henry Copeland started Blogads in 2002, out of North Carolina, with a model that let bloggers set their own prices and approve or reject each ad that came in. That second feature matters for politics. A partisan blogger can turn down a buy from the other side, or accept it and mock it in a post, and both have happened.

The Howard Dean campaign was among the first presidential efforts to take the format seriously in 2003, buying space on blogs where its supporters already gathered. By the 2004 general election, party committees, advocacy groups and independent organizations on both sides were testing blog placements, mostly to raise money and recruit volunteers rather than to persuade undecided voters.

Now, with the field for 2008 still forming, Copeland has been reporting that presidential hopefuls from both parties are already buying. That is a full year before the first caucus. Nobody spends this early on television except to introduce a name; online, the early spending is about collecting email addresses.

Why the ads sort themselves by ideology

The striking pattern in these buys is not the volume. It is the clean partisan split. Democratic hopefuls show up on Daily Kos, MyDD and similar community sites. Republican hopefuls appear on blogs whose readers also follow Instapundit or read columns aggregated on Townhall. Hardly anyone crosses over.

Part of that is simple economics. A campaign at this stage needs primary voters, donors and volunteers from its own party. A reader of a large progressive blog who has already given money to a Democrat in a previous cycle is worth far more to a Democratic primary candidate than a random web surfer, and the same logic holds on the right. The blog audience arrives pre-sorted, which saves the campaign from paying to reach people who will never vote in its primary.

Blogads has leaned into this by packaging blogs into bundled networks grouped by political leaning, so a buyer can reach dozens of like-minded sites with one order. For a media buyer, it resembles buying a cable channel with a known demographic, except the "channel" is a collection of individual writers who each keep veto power.

What the price tag hides

Blog ads are frequently described as cheap, and on a cost-per-thousand basis they often are. Here is an illustration with made-up but plausible numbers: a one-week sidebar ad priced at $1,200 on a site serving 380,000 page views that week works out to about $3.16 per thousand impressions. Local broadcast television in a contested market runs far higher per thousand viewers.

The comparison flatters the blog, though. Page views are not people. A heavy reader of a political community site might load the front page fifteen times a day, so 380,000 page views might represent a much smaller number of distinct individuals. The ad keeps showing the same face to the same loyal reader. That repetition can be useful for name recognition, yet it also means the true cost per new person reached is several times the headline figure.

The usual criticism, and why I think it misses

The standard dismissal of partisan blog ads is that they only preach to the choir. Why pay to reach people who already agree with you? I hear this from TV-oriented consultants regularly, and I think it misreads both the readers and the purpose.

First, in a primary, the choir is the electorate. Every serious candidate in each party is competing for the same pool of committed partisans. A Daily Kos reader is not yet committed to any particular Democrat, and a regular reader of a conservative blog has not yet picked among the Republicans. The ad is not preaching to converts; it is courting people who agree with the party but have not chosen a candidate.

Second, blog readers are disproportionately the people who talk about politics to others. They forward links, write posts of their own, argue in comment threads and show up at local meetings. An ad that persuades one of them to click and sign up may reach dozens of secondhand contacts. Television cannot easily buy that kind of relay.

Third, the format is measurable in a way a TV spot is not. The campaign knows exactly how many people clicked, which version of the ad they saw and, if it tracks signups carefully, which blog produced donors. That data feeds the next buy within days.

How campaigns appear to be using the format

From the ads I have collected so far, the stronger buys share a few habits:

• They run several versions at once, varying the image or the headline, and quietly drop the weaker ones.
• They link to a specific page, such as a petition, a signup form or a short video, rather than a generic home page.
• They speak the language of the host blog's audience, sometimes referencing an issue that community has been arguing about that week.
• They buy prominent placement at the top of the sidebar instead of the cheapest spot at the bottom.

The weaker ones look like shrunken billboards: a portrait, a name, a slogan and nothing to do. That approach wastes the one advantage the medium has, which is that the reader is a single click from acting.

Risks nobody is pricing in yet

A few things could go wrong, and they apply to every party equally.

The bloggers are not neutral publishers. If a host writer turns against a candidate mid-campaign, the candidate's ad will sit next to a post attacking him or her. Some bloggers already disclose their ad relationships in sidebar notes, but readers may still wonder whether money shapes coverage. That worry will grow as spending grows.

There is also the comment section. On many large blogs, readers react to ads in the threads. A clumsy ad can become the subject of a mocking thread that gets far more attention than the ad itself ever would.

Finally, ideological targeting can harden a campaign's habits. A staff that only buys on friendly sites may never learn how its message lands with independents. The general election will require talking to people who do not read Daily Kos or Instapundit at all.

What I will be watching

I plan to track three questions as the year unfolds. Will any campaign try crossover buys, placing ads on blogs of the other party to reach disaffected readers? Will spending shift from fundraising messages to persuasion messages as primaries approach? And will the bloggers themselves start rejecting ads from candidates their communities dislike?

Other contributors here are following similar questions from different angles; Lena is looking at virtual worlds next, and the political ads category collects everything we publish on paid media. For background on how earlier cycles used the web, see campaign history.