Blog ads work!
: Jeff Sharlet, editor of the (just redesigned) Revealer, a blog about religion at NYU (under Jay Rose), writes to tell me about his experience with advertising. Moral of the story: Ads on blogs worked. Ads on “media” sites didn’t. Now you could argue that’s true in part because advertising blogs on blogs is a kind of commercial echo chamber. But no, the blogs blew away the competition. Jeff writes::
The Revealer spent 7 k on advertising in the last month or so (most of our budget). We decided to divide it, roughly, between conventional online media and blog ads. Blog ads blew the conventional media out of the water.
The conventional media we chose were Beliefnet, Columbia Journalism Review, and American Journalism Review. CJR and AJR are small, specialty sites, but Beliefnet claims a readership of 2 million. I don’t know what Talking Points, Little Green Footballs, and Daily Kos claim, but I’d estimate that our small, second-level blog ads on those sites EACH outperformed Beliefnet by a factor of 10. At least. Other blogs, like Matthew Yglesias, Reason’s Hit and Run, and the Washington Monthly did so probably by a factor of five. And even very small blogs, like Donald Sensing’s, beat Beliefnet.
