Ok, now the pieces are starting to fall into place. Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong apparently help run an advertising network where many other liberal blogs get the bulk of their advertising money from.
Along with Armstrong and MyDD’s Chris Bowers, Kos runs a BlogAds advertising network called Advertising Liberally, to which a number of “Townhouse” members belong.
From Rogers Cadenhead, Nov. 15 2005, one of the founding members of BlogAds, who later parted ways with them.
The Drudge Retort [that’s ReTort, not RePort) 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.
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.
[Kos] charges $1,400 a week for ads [as of Nov 15, 2005] and regularly sells 6-8 of them. [Kos ads are now $4200 a week for the top spot]
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.