Bloggasm

Yesterday afternoon, gossip blogger Perez Hilton, with his 1.3 million followers on Twitter, tweeted the words, “Sponsored: I love to mix bright colors with classic styles to shake things up! Tweet style tips to #gapstyletips to appear on CocoPerez.com!” A cursory search on Twitter shows hundreds of users issuing tweets using the suggested hashtag. And if you visit the CocoPerez site (a female-oriented blog that Perez recently launched) you’ll find a kind of talk box aggregating all these tweets with the GAP brand prominently displayed on top.

Blogads CEO Henry Copeland told me in a phone interview last night that his company prefers this kind of community approach to sponsored tweets rather than simply having Perez blast out a single link to a sponsor (although he said that the advertising company is also selling more straightforward Twitter links).

“It definitely helps to have someone like Perez to tweet to spark the thing,” he said. “We also find that it can sustain itself because if you’re a reader of Perez Hilton and you see a box and right above that is a message saying tweet your dating advice” — another ad campaign run on Perez’s site — “then you’re very likely to do it.”

The effectiveness of the campaign, he said, often depends on the size of the box, where it’s located, and how it’s “modulated.” In that sense, the advertising, though tied into Twitter, is very reliant on Perez’s popularity on his blog.

Copeland estimated that Perez can drive about 20,000 clicks on a sponsored tweet if it’s worded correctly. He said that he’s had no problem selling the Twitter component in ad deals, but so far it’s only been rolled into larger advertising packages.

“All the deals that we’ve had Perez tweeting for have been part of six figure deals,” he said.

I asked Copeland about the new FCC rules being talked about that will force bloggers to disclose any sponsored word-of-mouth marketing campaigns.

“Frankly, I think we’ve been going overboard,” he said. “Every tweet has the word ’sponsored’ either before or after it, and I think it makes it pretty obvious. Basically a fifth of the message is disclosing … I certainly think it’s very imporatant to not only disclose, but to make prominent the fact that it’s sponsored.”

Blogads, a North Carolina company, currently represents hundreds of bloggers across all niches for advertising. So far, the sponsored Twitter campaigns have remained almost exclusively with Perez, one of the most widely-trafficked blogs in the Blogads network.

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Stinky Journalism has an investigative report out today highlighting the fact that NYTimes.com has been displaying advertisements touting sleazy health claims that it has decried in past editorials.

An article “With Resveratrol, Buyer Beware” published in the Science section of the New York Times on Aug. 18 takes aim at various Web advertisers—specifically age-reversing drug supplement companies—hawking their wares using deceptive cyber practices. However, omitted from the story is that The New York Times itself is at best nonchalant in its ad screening practices, and at worst complicit in trafficking these same deceptive Web sites–not disclosing the conflict they are lining their own pockets with ad revenue from this scam.

But where are these ads being displayed? Through contextual advertising from Google, it seems (though at least one didn’t come from Google). Given that Google is a third-party advertiser that is serving up the ads independently from the New York Times, should the Times be as responsible for these ads as they are for ones they place on their own?

Based on my own experience with Adsense, I know you can reject ads that are appearing on your site, but because of the contextual nature of them it’s not always easy to keep track of the hundreds of ads that are served up when users come in from different searches. You could be running sleazy ads in your archives that you didn’t know existed. So it seems unfair to expect the newspaper to keep track and squash every single questionable ad being served up by Google.

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I was combing through my RSS feeds and came across this ad at the bottom of a post from Eschaton. It doesn’t appear to be a Google ad (usually they’re clearly marked). Without knowing how his RSS feed advertising works, I wonder if Duncan Black, the liberal economist who runs the blog, realizes that he’s promoting Scientology with his posts?

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Though it seems natural that online advertising would slow during a down economy, we’re seeing signs that it will never reach the lucrative stature that the print industry has known for years. Blogads CEO Henry Copeland told me a few months ago that when it comes to highly-trafficked blogs, there’s too much supply and not enough demand. The ease of entry not only for publishing, but for entering the ad market as well — Adsense, affiliate links, etc. — has created an overabundance for cheap advertising, dividing it up into millions of $5 morsels that do very little for individual bloggers and take away advertising dollars from the bigger players.

This is not to say that content is worthless, but that people are having to find alternate ways of monetizing their sites. Bloggasm, for me, is a loss leader to sell my digital PR services, and we’re finding that more and more bloggers are using their blogs to make connections within their fields, leading to more lucrative jobs and contracts.

This creates a dilemma for many mainstream journalists, however, because of the ethics concerns that would arise if they used their content to promote paying gigs. We saw this with the Washington Post salons a few weeks ago. But still, journalists like Chris Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell have turned their celebrity journalism status into well-paying speaking gigs, and likely many lower level journalists have enjoyed at least some prosperity from the connections they’ve made through their journalism. But though this may solve a problem for the journalist, what does it do for the news organization?

For them, it’s simply a matter of clawing for smaller and smaller sums in advertising dollars.

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Nick Denton: ” I’d rather be wrong and thriving than right and dead.”

The plunge has already been pretty terrifying for a range of companies from Yahoo and IAC to the newspapers. But I was wrong in one respect: a few premium internet brands, Gawker’s among them, have withstood the advertising apocalypse.

Here is an updated version of the apocalyptic chart I published last year. The scale is removed but you can see that Gawker’s advertising growth continued pretty much uninterrupted: first-half revenues were up 45%. Sometimes there’s consolation to be found in congenital pessimism

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With ad revenue up 35%, Gawker Media returns to pageview bonuses and plans “checkbook journalism”

It was a busy day at Gawker Media, which just introduced a new, “tiered” commenting system, so I was cutting our conversation short when Denton wrote, “Oh, one other little thing.” Yes? “By bringing back pageview pay, we also open up the possibility of web-style checkbook journalism.” By that, he meant paying tipsters for the pageviews generated by posts based on their tips, which is something he briefly tried last year, offering $7.50 per 1,000 views.

Denton noted that Gawker paid $10,000 for the original version of a Faith Hill photograph that appeared on the cover of Redbook with extensive retouching. “Worth it?” I asked him. “Definitely!” he said. “Probably 2m pageviews.”

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The Onion’s CEO Orders More Pandering to Advertisers

The Onion is hurting badly. To survive, the publication must cave to advertisers, CEO Steve Hannah has declared in a memo to staff, which we’ve obtained and reproduced after the jump.

You may recall that the multimedia humor juggernaut killed two of its local print editions in May. The move came amid a “very rough first half of the year,” as Hannah puts it in his memo, and a total of $6 million in cost reductions.

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