The most popular political weblogs have been able to support their publishers through an intermediary called Blogads. As this election season heated up, most of the top sites saw extreme traffic spikes and have been able to set lucrative- but- competitive prices for ad views (not clickthrough) on their sites.

Now that we are probably entering a period of ebbing political interest (unless there's a sustained involvement in, say, Bush's second-term cabinet choices or court appointees), the traffic on political blogs will most likely drop off. I couldn't help wondering if this was going to produce a drag on ad pricing, so I asked Henry Copeland, the entrepreneur behind blogads.com for his take on this and (understandably) he is still sanguine on the blog-ad market:

Unless traffic drops way off, I don't think prices will decline. Obviously though, a whole class of advertisers - the candidates - is gone for a good while and another important class - the political cause - will be dormant for a period while people recuperate from the last sprint. But lower prices would not change these two classes of buyers, so why drop them? If anything bloggers may want to raise prices slightly to make the commercial advertisers who are showing up pay for the greater mindshare they are buying. (Note that I think the causes will return in force eventually, I'm just not sure whether it is two weeks or two months.)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Copeland foresees longterm rises in blog-ad pricing. He expects traffic to keep rising and points out that, "Relative to all other online media, blogads are very cheap." He attributes this to the lower overhead of bloggers when compared to corporate media and the fact that Blogads charges a smaller commission than traditional banner-ad networks such as Doubleclick.

Note: as a sign of the times, the Blogads weblog reports that the two newest ads listed on November 3rd were for right-wing swag and absinthe.

Update: The Wall Street Journal follows this same story and quotes Kos admitting to being a little "nervous" about the ad market for blogs after the election.

Second update: TalkLeft is lowering some rates in response to the post-election ad sales slump.