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| Home Front: Politix |
| Daily Kos & Co. Hose Liberal Blogger In Business Deal |
| 2005-11-15 |
| I love a good pissing match, via FARK. My Due Diligence on the Liberal Ad Network The Drudge Retort has been kicked out of the Liberal Blog Advertising Network, a group of 75 liberal sites organized by Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos and Chris Bowers and Jerome Armstrong of MyDD under the guidance of BlogPAC, a political action committee that Moulitsas and Armstrong began in 2004. Bowers personally invited me to join the network in May 2005, sending several e-mails until I agreed to become one of its founding members. I thought it was a good way to bring liberal blogs closer together and make some money in the 2006 election year, so I've been working on it for six months, running the network's "Advertise Liberally" ad on the Retort 6.5 million times during that span and setting up a private blog for members. The network has been experiencing a double super-secret flamewar since Bowers announced in mid-October that they were unilaterally changing the rules to excludes several well-trafficked members, including the Retort, Raw Story and Smirking Chimp. At this time next year, I planned to be sunning on the deck of a new yacht bought with political ad riches, thanks to our country's lack of meaningful campaign finance reform. I saw myself picking up the New York Times, reading about the newly elected Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, the first day of Karl Rove's prison term and the Texas Rangers' victory in the World Series. Instead, I've just given six months of effort and free ad space worth $2,200 to a liberal ad network that's now my competition. Some conservatives will have a field day with this, suggesting that liberal bloggers don't know the business world because we're up in our ivory towers smoking medicinal marijuana as we search for gay spotted owls who want to get married. But things could be worse for the liberal ad network -- it could be Pajamas Media. I think the moral of this story is simple: Practice due diligence before getting into business with Moulitsas, Armstrong and Bowers. A trait that makes them entertaining bloggers -- a talent for getting into fights they don't need to have -- doesn't translate well to making a network of weblogs advertiser friendly. I realized this a few weeks ago when Moulitsas used the Daily Kos front page to threaten potential advertisers: ... campaigns should advertise on blogs to reach readers, not to "endorse" the publication. We're bloggers. We'll say things that are "controversial". If campaigns don't think they can weather such storms, then by all means they should NOT advertise on blogs. Because every time a campaign freaks out at a blogger and pulls their ads, we're going to raise a stink about it and inevitably make that campaign look bad. So they should think long and hard before putting money into a Blogad campaign. My jaw dropped when I read this response to the Kaine gubernatorial campaign in Virginia, which pulled an ad from Steve Gilliard because of his provocative depiction of an African-American politician in blackface. The political situation for a Democrat in a tight race, days before the election, was less important than a blogger's need to keep it real. Moulitsas can afford to say crazy shit like that, because Democratic politicians view Daily Kos as an ATM machine and assembly line for grass-roots liberal activists. He charges $1,400 a week for ads and regularly sells 6-8 of them. For the rest of the 75-minus-me members in the liberal ad network, "don't pull an ad or we'll hurt you" is a bit of a tough sell. |
| Posted by:Raj |