A few thoughts:
I'm totally on board with using a web site to promote moneybombs. I got frustrated in 2012 of moneybombs moving toward Facebook events and warned that such move would produce lackluster results. So we shifted back to web-site-centric marketing for Black This Out and Tea Party '11, with great success. Unfortunately, that understanding didn't carry over this year and I would contend that its part of the reason moneybombs haven't produced reasonable results in 2016.
With that said, I'm not entirely sold on the concept of paying blogs to promote the moneybomb via advertisement space. I'm not sure why we wouldn't instead ask blogs to simply write blog posts promoting the moneybomb web site. Not only is that more likely to generate substantially more traffic, but it also boosts the web sites ability to improve its natural ranking in Google for relevant keyword terms (over time, of course). Additionally, I'd feel far more comfortable donating money to a wide-reaching Google Adwords campaign that targets those same blogs who very likely already have Google Adsense incorporated.
I fail to see how the proposed solution differs from Google's solution and I would contend the power of Google Adwords is far more worth leveraging to properly target the ads and even do remarketing. If the issue is wanting to provide incentive for blogs and web sites to contribute, we solved that problem in 2012 by promoting those web sites from the moneybomb web site and exposing them to huge audiences. I could probably look back and provide data on how much traffic was delivered to produce a use case that can be promoted to those web sites.
What I'd be willing to really donate toward is a high-end "commercial" to promote a moneybomb that can then be advertised across Rand/Ron Paul videos on YouTube. That to me is the next progression of our moneybomb efforts and would likely be quite successful.
Finally, I am not convinced that moneybombs, as approached for Ron Paul, work for Rand. It was both novelty and nostalgia that drove 2008 and 2012 moneybomb success. If we want to do successful fundraising for Rand, we will need to approach it from an entirely different way. I've proposed a more sustainable model that I termed "moneystream" and is focused on gaining commitment from supporters to donate $10 per week. So those same 20,000 donors would generate $200k every week, perpetually until the end of the campaign. I think that is more valuable to the campaign, in my opinion. The benefit of that model is its not dependent on a one time boom or bust and efforts can contribute to a singular growth pattern and market penetration. The current model demands we expend effort to promote the moneybomb and the value of that effort expires the very day after the moneybomb is finished.
Let me also point out that in 2012, I committed to the belief that the moneybomb e-mail list belongs to the grassroots as a direct response to the questionable use of the 2008 list that then became unavailable to us in 2012. We agreed that for anyone to acquire the list that it must never be sold and it was well guarded from that happening. Today, I believe Orenbus has that list and acquired it on that same principle.
I think it would be wise for us to demand from Trevor that the e-mails collected will never be sold to a third party. To put that into legal effect, I'd request that there is a disclaimer, like we had in 2012, that the list won't ever be sold to a third party. Then the grassroots has a measure for recourse if the list is used inappropriately.