Fraters Libertas

Bring It On

Bob Von Sternberg has a front page piece in today's Star Tribune (registration required) on the potential impact of political web ads, focusing particular attention on blogs and Blogads.

For the uninitiated, blogs (shorthand for Web log) are online personal journals posted and continually updated on the World Wide Web. While many are insular and self-referential, an increasing number are pointedly political, with distinct partisan leanings.

Insular and self-referential? Us? Why just the other day I was talking about this subject with Mitch Berg from Shot In The Dark and...

Increasingly, bloggers have discovered a way to turn their private obsession into a profit center by selling ads that are remarkably cheap compared to ad rates demanded by broadcast and print mass media.

Recognizing a potentially ripe market when he saw one, North Carolina Internet entrepreneur Henry Copeland invented Blogads.com, a business to place ads on blogs that share the political leanings of the advertiser.

This is part of his sales pitch: "You need to woo the early adopters that traditional media can't reach. ... Read by fanatics, pundits and journalists, blogs increasingly set the insider agenda. Use blogads to start advertising where opinions are made."

That actually does describe our readers quite well. The fanatic part at least.

Whether the ads work or not, they've been a windfall for bloggers, who have been able to boost their rates as much as 50 percent because of increasing demand, Copeland said.

"And they are going to rise more," he said. "Since bloggers don't have big overheads and lots of mouths to feed, they can charge less. They are extraordinarily cheap relative to corporate media. Advertising that would cost you $70,000 on WashingtonPost.com would cost $3,000 on blogs."

Speaking as a blog with enormous overhead (the monthly mortgage payment on the sprawling Fraters compound itself is more than the GDP of most African countries) and many mouths to feed (the way the Krispy Kremes are fought for in the weekly staff meetings resembles nothing less than a pack of hyenas battling over a carcass on the Serengeti plains) this is a most welcome development. Up to this point we haven't dabbled in advertising here at Fraters Libertas, because quite frankly we wondered why anyone in their right minds would fork over as much as a dime to appear on our site. But now with the obvious paradigm shift in the advertising mindset regarding blogs, we're more than willing to start selling out and cashing in.

So we say bring it on. Political campaign managers in Minnesota and nationwide should know that we're ready to play ball. Republicans, Democrats, Greens, Reformers, Buchannites, socialists, Larouchites, communist worker's, Luddites, Know Nothings, constitutionalists, whigs, hell we'll even sell ads to those wacky Libertarians. Principles be damned. It's time for payola.

Get in now before we're forced to raise rates. You can be assured that if you don't, your opponents will:

While no Minnesota candidates appear to have launched ads, the DFL has jumped into the "blogosphere," where ads run by state parties are still rare. The party's ads, bought by the DFL House Democratic Caucus, blare: "Don't Let Bush Turn Minnesota Into 2004's Florida!!"

The ads, launched this week at a cost of $2,000, netted about $400 in the first few days, said John Van Hecke, the caucus' campaign manger.

"I'd been thinking a lot about what Howard Dean was doing, about the success of folks like MoveOn and hoped this could work really well," he said. "It's the job of a political organization to communicate with voters, and an awful lot of people read blogs. Politics is not rocket science. You go where the people are."