Candidates can buy ads, for instance, that only appear in certain sections of Web sites. During the Iowa caucuses, the Kerry campaign ran ads in the "help wanted" section of the Des Moines Register's Web site. The appeals can also be directed at users who fit certain demographic and geographic profiles. The Washington Post's site, washingtonpost.com, which Kerry also has advertised on, requires readers to provide their Zip code, gender, income level and other personal information. That data is used to target advertising to individual users -- so much so that two readers viewing the same page from different computers may see different ads.
Kerry has launched a number of ads, most of which focus on closing his fundraising gap with Bush. "If you want Bush out of the White House we need your help today," said one ad, alongside an unflattering picture of Bush. Another animated ad depicts Bush as a king, sitting on a pile of gold. "Bush is attacking John Kerry with a mountain of money," the ad says. "Your $25 gift now can put us over the top and help topple Bush!" His campaign declined to say how much it has raised from the ads.
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The candidates' allies are also buying ads. America Coming Together, an independent Democratic group, has begun advertising on several liberal blogs and Google, and is preparing to run ads on the search engine Yahoo and several national newspapers' Web sites. Wes Boyd, co-founder of the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org, said his organization will probably begin advertising online this year. The anti-tax Club for Growth is also considering buying ads, while the Democratic National Committee has begun experimenting with Google ads.
The Republican National Committee has been particularly aggressive, posting ads on about 1,500 sites each of the past four months. "Show your support for the president's success and learn more about the future," said one. The spots have run on a wide range of sites, including AutoTrader.com and the Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive.
"We're working to reach out to as broad an audience as possible," said Christine Iverson, a spokeswoman for the committee.
The party declined to estimate how much it has spent on the effort. But its campaign dwarfed those of both Bush and Kerry during the first four months of the year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. The group measures ad traffic in terms of "impressions," which is the number of times an ad appears on a computer screen. If you see an ad somewhere -- that is one impression. If you hit the "refresh" button and see it again, that's another impression.
The firm reported that over those four months, the RNC racked up more than 550 million impressions. Kerry's campaign drummed up more than 60 million, while Bush -- who launched his education ad this month, after the study had ended -- barely registered.
Those totals are modest compared with what many companies spent on online ads. AT&T Wireless, one of the largest advertisers online, ran up more than 12 billion impressions over that same period, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Moreover, while the presidential campaigns declined to say how much they are spending on the ads, outside experts said it is probably a fraction of what they spend on television ads.
But they predicted that as the election nears, the ads will become more common. "It's as near to certainty as you have in the world of the Internet," said Michael Cornfield, a political scientist at George Washington University. "The closeness of the race is not deterring innovation -- it seems to be spurring it."
