Bloggasm

Business Week has an article out today debating the merits of Pay Per Post, the advertising strategy of paying bloggers to blog about a product — with or without full disclosure. As the article notes, this idea isn’t exactly new; advertorials (advertisements dressed up like opinion columns) have existed in magazines, newspapers and talk radio for years. But it’s something relatively new to the blogosphere, and I suppose the ethics of pay-per-post still merit a debate.

Other than Google Adsense I’ve never carried advertising on Bloggasm, but that’s not to say I haven’t thought about what strategies I would implement if I ever were to try to write here full time. If I ever decided to join an advertising network (Blogads for instance) and managed to maintain a steady line of advertisers, I would engage in a practice that surprisingly few bloggers use: Thanking my sponsors.

It’s the perfect middle ground between pay-per-post and banner ads. In fact, you’re only thanking the sponsors who have purchased banner ads on your site.

How would it work? It’s simple. You pick a day to run the thank-you post every week (since most advertisers stick with you for at least a week), and then you offer full disclosure and provide links to your sponsors.

For the fun of it, I’ll write a “thank you” post that Daily Kos could run today:

Thanks to our sponsors

I just want to take the opportunity today to thank our sponsors, who make running this site possible. This is not an endorsement of any causes or products.

1. The Green Festival Reader presents addresses of the foremost thinkers and activists including, Van Jones, David Korten, Dennis Kucinich, Bill McKibben and more.

2. Join us for the Netroots Nation Yes We Can Party on Monday, January 19, at the Clarendon Ballroom in Arlington, VA (just off the Orange Metro line).

3. Taking on the System. “This book captures the spirit of our nation’s modern-day pamphleteers” - Elizabeth Edwards

And that’s it. By doing this, not only are you exposing your fully-disclosed sponsors to your RSS readers, who may not often click through to the site, you’re also displaying them to those who have ad block and the readers who mentally ignore banner ads. And assuming that you write several posts a day and only publish one “thank you” post a week, then your readers won’t feel like they’re being bombarded with advertorials. Also, advertisers would be much more willing to work with you because they know how much value comes with such a post.

Best of all, I would consider a “thank you” post to be much less ethically murky than a pay-per-post.

This is something that I’ve believed for years, that using programs like Blogads — which allow you to upload an ad without the assistance of a human being — is much more effective than advertising in a magazine or newspaper. You pay $30,000 for a full page ad in a glossy magazine and you’re lucky if a reader happens upon that page once. But with a blog advertisement, the ad appears every time the page is loaded, no matter what blog post or page you happen to be viewing. Every incoming reader, whether he’s coming in from Google or another outside source, sees the ad.

I’m apparently not the only one who thinks so: Blogs Find Favor as Buying Guides:

While the rise of blog readership in recent years is no secret, the power of blogs to influence what people buy is less established. But as a recent study reveals, that power is significant — so much that a majority of blog readers say blogs are useful when they make purchases.

The study, which polled 2,210 people and was released this fall, found that the increase in blog readership from 2004 to 2008 was 300 percent; 47 percent of online consumers now read blogs.

Half of blog readers said blogs were useful when they were considering what purchases to make, and more than half of that group said they looked at a blog just when they were about to buy something.

By creating a viral ad just for the fun of it. This is from AKQA:

A PR person just emailed me this new anti-Obama ad that’s supposedly going to start running in swing states from a group that calls itself Our Country Deserves Better PAC. It looks like the Republicans have decided that Clinton voters are a key weakness for the candidate and they’re going to try to twist the knife as much as possible.

The dumbest quote from the ad: “He says he’ll play nicey nice with Islamic militants who want to kill Americans at home and abroad.” Much of what the woman in the ad says are recycled Republican talking points that wore thin 6 months ago (Rezco, Obama is an Islamoterrorist, flip flopper), but the Clinton footage certainly packs a punch.

Of course there is no shortage of prominent Republicans that have said bad things about McCain; Will Democrats start running audio footage of James Dobson bashing McCain in order to chip away at his Christian base?

Steve Outing asserts that Craigslist is not the enemy. He says this despite the fact that his new site, Reinventing Classifieds, is focused on reversing trends that Craigslist and its ilk have caused.

“Enemy? No, I wouldn’t use that word,” Outing said in a phone interview today. “If Craig [Newmark] wouldn’t have come along with this idea then someone else would have. The nature of what the internet makes possible meant that all this was going to happen no matter what. Newspapers just need to adapt to a new reality and it’s as simple as that.”

Regardless of how you frame the free classifieds site’s relationship to newspapers, its effects on revenue cannot be ignored. According to the Newspaper Association of America, newspaper classified buys declined by 16.5% between 2006 and 2007 — a drop of nearly $3 billion. Scarcely a publisher exists who can say the word “Craigslist” without the underlying tone of doom and contempt.

Outing, for his part, is not sitting idly by to watch. The web guru wrote for a number of newspapers until the early ’90s and later left to cover new media and consult with various companies about the intersection of the internet and journalism. He’s been writing a column on the subject for Editor and Publisher for years.

A web startup Outing had been working on hadn’t quite panned out, and as it was closing shop last year he began doing consulting work with Christopher Ryan, the creator of Future of News, a site that allows advertisers to place ads in newspapers without human interaction. “[Chris] has this idea that he’s working on…The product is going to be called Ad Everywhere,” Outing said. “It’s going to be a distributed web strategy for getting back classified revenues…We came up with this idea to do a separate site that was not part of that effort that would be a venue or a clearing house to help folks think through this issue. Both of us feel strongly that the traditional model doesn’t work and we really need to come up with something totally different and nobody seems to have done it. Newspapers continue to bleed staff. Things are not pretty right now. Both of us came out of the newspaper industry and we feel strongly that there’s still a lot of value in saving that kind of journalism.”

Reinventing Classifieds, the result of these discussions, will combine case studies, solicited media columns, and the mining of crowd wisdom to live up to its name. Outing has already released an online survey that tries to pinpoint innovative methods that individual publishers are using to reverse the dire trends. “We’ll probably devote a lot of the site to highlighting success stories that various businesses have had,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll certainly come out with some kind of written documented solution that publishers can adopt on their own.”

Behind the scenes of all this is Christopher Ryan’s new advertising platform he’ll be working on in the coming months. Outing explained that Reinventing Classifieds wasn’t necessarily created as a marketing tool for the new platform, but rather the site is more of a separate semi-altruistic endeavor to save a threatened form of media. “I think [Chris] has a pretty clear vision of what he wants and I’m kind of adding my two cents as an outside consultant,” he said. “Regardless of the information that comes through the site he has an idea of what he wants. But I think what happens on the site will influence him as he develops it. It’s a great way to come up with a solution or platform that meets a lot of the needs for potential customers.”

But does Outing really believe that he can not only stop the bleeding advertising dollars but also reverse the trend?

“Yeah I do because I think newspapers still have huge brand recognition within local communities,” he said. “And I definitely do not feel like it’s lost yet. But without doing something radical sometime soon, the industry doesn’t have much hope.”

And proving that it’s not only politics that makes strange bedfellows, Outing has lined up a rather interesting guest writer who will pen a post for the site within the next few weeks: Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist.

So remember Donutgate? Possibly the dumbest “scandal” manufactured by the right-wing blogosphere (and that’s saying a lot)? Well before it gets swept into the dustbin of stupidity forever, make sure you watch this clip from a Fox News show. It turns out that nobody informed this guy that Dunkin Donuts was one of Fox News’ sponsors. Hilarity ensues.

This is utterly bizarre. A car dealership in Mojave, California called Kieffe & Sons Ford has been running this advertisement on local radio stations:

["Did you know that there are people in this country who want prayer out of schools, "Under God" out of the Pledge, and "In God We Trust" to be taken off our money?"]

“But did you know that 86% of Americans say they believe in God? Since we all know that 86 out of every 100 of us are Christians, who believe in God, we at Kieffe & Sons Ford wonder why we don’t tell the other 14% to sit down and shut up. I guess I just offended 14% of the people who are listening to this message. Well, if that is the case then I say that’s tough, this is America folks, it’s called free speech. None of us at Kieffe & Sons Ford is afraid to speak out. Kieffe & Sons Ford on Sierra Highway in Mojave and Rosamond, if we don’t see you today, by the grace of God, we’ll be here tomorrow.”

First off, they don’t even have the statistics correct. As The Underground Believer notes, only 73% of the U.S. identifies as Christian. Secondly, what the hell does this have to do with cars? The dealership is voluntarily going out of its way to offend a sizable portion of its potential customer base with an advertisement that has nothing to do with its business.

Not only are you directly attacking 27% of the population, you’re also likely offending a good number of left-of-center Christians who would cringe at such unsubtle bigotry.

Here’s one way to strike back: Gather around five atheists in that area. Over the course of the week have each of them go in and show interest in buying some of the most expensive cars in the lot. Then, after they’ve wasted a good 30 minutes to an hour talking to you, bargaining with you, and getting ready for you to sign the contract and give them those great commissions, have sudden epiphanies that this was the dealership that had those offensive ads. Then have them walk out without buying the cars.

This way, not only does this get them thinking they’ve lost out on thousands of dollars in sales, but it also wastes their valuable time they’ve spent tending to you.

So who’s up for it?