Are there online forum locations that can serve a comparable purpose for a lot less?
Well, sure. There is online advertising, which you can put anywhere and reach any audience. And then you can target it locally. And you can target it to any interest group based on the content of the website. And candidates are doing more and more of that, as are issue-advocacy organizations. Online advertising is different, inherently, in a lot of ways than television advertising. And the most important way is just that it doesn’t take up all of your screen for a certain amount of time, standing in between you and whatever content you wanted to access. And that’s just because the medium doesn’t work well in that context. People won’t stand for it online and find ways around it online. So, from a purely advertising standpoint, it has a different level of impact, and it’s hard to guarantee the same localized saturation. Because, in a lot of places, there is not as dense a web infrastructure that is clearly localized content, meaning: Let’s say you are trying to advertise in Des Moines.
