texasliberty
Member
- Joined
- Dec 2, 2007
- Messages
- 121
Thanks, Cyclone. The Blimp team has started posting new additions on the blimp blog (I send them a zip file periodically to use or not use as they see fit), so there are some other ones there.
The specific values for things are admittedly pretty rough guesses, but hopefully reasonable ones. My logic went like this:
- For print media, we know a full-page newspaper ad in USA Today in the front-but-not-really-front section cost $85k, from that gentleman who bought one. That's a national publication with a very broad reach, so most ad space should cost less. Some papers are local or regional, some give you big articles with lots of photos and some give you just a sentence or two in a minor part or a writeup in their online version. It's a lot of moderate or low-value stuff with occasional very high-value pieces that skew the whole thing. The Blimp is photogenic so people tend to put pictures in articles, and those take up page space and are worth something too, so sometimes even a couple sentences comes with a good photo. So I figured if you averaged them all together that the average mainstream print media mention has to be worth at least $2500. It's hard to buy a newspaper ad of any sort that costs too much less than that, so that seemed like a pretty safe number (it could be really low, but it's one I figured was pretty defendable).
- For TV, there's the cost to make an ad and the cost to air it. When you hear big numbers like "$200,000 ad buy", a big chunk (arguably most) of the ad cost is making it. I just discounted that and looked at the actual air time. I found some references on that through google searching, here's one:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpa...ness/Small Business/Marketing and Advertising
They say:
Looking back at that, we may be way low on TV (we're using $2400/30secs for prime time and $600/30secs for non-prime time or local TV). I guess I thought we would get a lot more coverage on local TV or non-banner-channels. In reality almost all our coverage has been CNN, with some FOX and a little local [it's hard to find the local, unless someone TIVOs it and uploads it somewhere, there's a lot we probably miss there]. Note that you can buy spots as low as $30 or so, but those are on scrappy cable channels at weird hours.
- For internet media & blogs I just valued an article of any sort at $100. Again, that's probably low; sometimes it's just a sentence or two but we tend to get pretty decent actual articles in internet media and people do see it a lot. I figured, again, what does a blog ad cost? Very high profile internet media (AOL) I score as mainstream media (it's basically Time Warner now). Internet media owned by mainstream media (ex. Boston Globe blogs) gets folded in as mainstream media. So every time Wonkette writes a hit piece on us, we credit ourselves $100 'cause that's about all they're worth
And obviously this is just the stuff we catch. Google is pretty good at print media and internet media but it doesn't get everything. TV and some other stuff I see posted here I add manually as I see it. I figure the real total value (not counting the ad impressions of people seeing the Blimp itself) is something between the total number posted here and twice that, since I aimed to hit a solid defendable floor number. But that part's getting into guesswork.
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