Brian Flemming has an interesting post about his use of BlogAds to promote his movie, Nothing So Strange, a fake documentary about the assassination of Bill Gates. One quote from his post stood out to me:
Curiously enough, this wtf-factor was effective with at least one consumer: me. Well, the story’s a bit more convoluted than that. Allow me to indulge myself in a brief divergence, then I’ll get back to BlogAds as a whole.
About six or so months ago, I first read about Nothing So Strange because of an interview at Film Threat. This kicked me over to the Nothing So Strange site, which kicked me to a discussion about BitPass, which kicked me over to Scott McCloud’s site, which inspired me to read Understanding Comics, which in turn introduced me to serious comics, which has in turn lead to the sheets of paper cluttering my desk on which I am drawing a comic. In the midst of all that leading and kicking, I entirely forgot about Nothing So Strange, or, rather, I forgot the title and the director. Until I saw a BlogAd over at Josh Marshall’s site, advertising discussion of “the last major murder of the twentieth century,” or somesuch. Viola! Nothing So Strange.
Anyway, that enigmatic ad, featuring a blurry photograph of a man in a red hat, caught my eye in a way that the other BlogAds hadn’t. (Incidentally, the latest Nothing So Strange ad is equally enigmatic: a police officer in riot gear, and a comment about how the 2000 Democratic Convention was “reality hacked.” The ad leads to this post which is bound to be fascinating to process junkies.) Kevin Drum, of CalPundit, noted recently that all of the BlogAds on his site seem to have become political fundraising ads.
This intrigues me. I’ve said previously that although I dislike Howard Dean as a candidate, I believe that his campaign model is something that we’ll see copied in the future. I think we’re seeing the beginning of that copy-catting with the BlogAds being flooded by political ads. Similarly, Ben Chandler has been in advertising heavily on Eschaton and at the Daily Kos (and possibly others that I haven’t seen) to fundraise for his bid in the Kentucky special election held… Today, I suppose. (I haven’t been to bed yet; it’s three in the morning.)
I’m intrigued to see how much these politicians actually end up getting through their blog-related advertising. But, it seems that the BlogAds are working for filmmakers, and presumably for the coffee-sellers and kitsch-dealers also advertising on the blogs I frequent. I’m still not sure that blogs will last or if they’ll go the way of the CB radio or if they’ll simply be taken-over by corporate sponsors, but… It’s nice to seem them working while they’re here..
I use free software that filters out all web-based advertisements. I imagine more people will do so as the technology becomes easier to use. The only answer will be for people to pay other bloggers to insert advertisements into the actual content of their blog posts – like product placements in movies.
I think the major effective point of blogads, especially if you’re dealing with political advertising, is the seemingly limitless fundraising capabilities of the internet, since when you see an ad asking to contribute something, you don’t have to do anything out-of-the-way to do so, just click, fill out a form and spend.
But this is an off-the-cuff economic analysis by a math major who hasn’t taken an economics class since 10th grade, so take it with a grain of salt.
“Understanding Comics”–great book, eh?
I could really, really, really do without commercial advertising on non-free blogs (I don’t count free Blogspot’s banner ads because those aren’t solicited by the blogger in question). Particularly political ones. It tends to make one wonder if the blogger could still be unbiased and critical about the advertiser…
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