• by Shankar Gupta , January 29, 2007

An effort to run ads on political blogs last week landed presidential hopeful Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in hot water with some bloggers from both left- and right-wing sites.

To promote a series of podcasts, her campaign had purchased ads on conservative blogs, including Powerline, HughHewitt.com, Wizbang.com, and Captain's Quarters, as well as more liberal blogs. But after the podcast series ended Wednesday, her campaign requested that the right-wing blogs remove the ads. The campaign promised to continue paying for the ad space--in effect paying the blogs to not run the ads. At the same time, the campaign expanded to encompass more left-wing blogs.

The campaign's inclusion of right-wing blog ads drew ire from both sides of the blogosphere aisle. Matt Stoller, an author at MyDD.com, wrote: "Why do people like [Clinton], no matter how often it becomes clear that wingnuts hate us, seek approval from wingnuts?"

Another left-wing blogger, Taylor Marsh, criticized Clinton for omitting her blog in the original buy, pointing out that former Senator John Edwards had made a broader buy. "I appreciated Edwards' ad immensely, as did my readers, no doubt, because the more ads I get the less I have to run fundraisers," she wrote. "Edwards knows small businesses count and puts his BlogAds on our sites."

But Eric Porres, co-founder of online political advertising firm Pericles Consulting, which mainly deals with right-wing candidates, said that the exposure and experience the Clinton campaign got from the blog ads buy outweighs the negative press. "A lot of digital ink has been spilled on this, and the learning alone that the Clinton campaign got from such a small buy far outweighs any of the ensuing scuttlebutt about X being left in while Y was left out of the first buy," he said. "Most importantly, that any of the campaigns are turning to the Web so early for online advertising of any kind is encouraging for us all."