That Guy...

You know, that guy who advertised on Althouse. He wrote back.

My decision to run an ad on Althouse is an experiment. When it finishes running, I'll post the results on The Business of America is Business.

I'll be interested to read about his experiment, though it appears he's mainly interested in getting some data to do a dollar-based economic analysis of the efficacy of advertising. (I hope he'll correct me if I'm wrong.) I had assumed the ad meant he was more interested in eyeballs than in clicks.

Because actually (not being particularly business-oriented, much to my own detriment), I'm interested in the developing importance of blogs as one component of an academic career - that is, as a calling card, a means of collaboration, and a way of increasing one's own value in the academic market - very much like traditional publication does. I assume blogs are also becoming an increasingly useful tool for attracting business, as well as for getting the word out on various subjects of interest.

I know, I said that already. Vide infra, as they say. (Because, per standard blogging layout, what I've written previously appears below. Not above. Supra would be incorrect, geographically speaking. So nyah, nitpickers.)

There is, in addition to the dozens of dollars to be made from selling advertising on one's blog, a certain self-referential, blogospheric cache to getting lots of hits and lots of comments. For some bloggers that cache extends outside the blogosphere. Ain't It Cool News, The Smoking Gun and The Drudge Report, for instance, have high profiles in the real world; Instapundit and Professor Bainbridge, perhaps, more compact and specialized circles of influence; Althouse, as another example, seems to be read mostly inside the blogosphere. (Don't get me wrong, I like Althouse.) And then there's me, poor ill-favored thing...