Last week Politico took New York City by storm as they gave out free copies of their publication to many prominent business leaders and added distribution boxes in high volume areas.

Politico’s original climb to success was in the Washington D.C. area where prominent subscribers include Congress and The White House.

The video shown below includes appearances by David Gregory, Donald Trump, Bob Schieffer, Katie Couric, Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, Willie Geist, Diane Sawyer, Tom Brokaw, Candy Crowley, Luke Russert, Greta Van Susteren, Chris Matthews, Jonathan Karl, Andrea Mitchell, Steve Scully, Jamal Simmons, Norah O’Donnell, Erin Burnett, Alex Wagner, Dan Rather, Al Sharpton, Mark Halperin, Dylan Ratigan and Arianna Huffington:

Politico will be strategically placing distribution boxes around the the City of New York, but will also be handing out free copies of their publication to business leaders and financial institution to spark interest. So if your in the New York City area or you’re in D.C., check them out.

From that announcement:

“Facebook will compile mentions of the candidates in U.S. users’ posts and comments as well as assess positive and negative sentiments expressed about them. Facebook’s data team will use automated software tools frequently used by researchers to infer sentiment from text.”

As an example of the kind of data this mining will reveal, they offer this. Here are some screenshots:

The Google Blog offers more details.  “With less than six weeks until the midterm elections, we wanted to hear from some of politics’ most creative minds about what innovation and democracy mean in 2010.”

“As part of the event David Axelrod and Ed Gillespie will answer questions and offer thoughts and predictions about the upcoming elections. Arianna Huffington will then moderate a panel about innovation in media, and will be joined by Becki Donatelli, Stephen Hayes, Nate Silver and Amy Walter. We’ll also demonstrate tools built for citizens and government officials using YouTube and Google Maps, and will be joined by our friends on the politics team at Facebook.”

Google is also inviting people to submit a question for any of the panel members via youtube.com/citizentube. People will also be able to watch the entire event live on YouTube on Monday from 2:30-5:30 ET and on POLITICO.

Interestingly enough, the coverage of any election still has an old school feel. A lot of people turn to TV for their marathon Election Day live prognostications and exit polls and projections. Much like the phenomenon of traditional Black Friday shopping the day after Thanksgiving and the following online “Black Monday” the real traffic for news sites occurs the day after the event as people try to make sense of what just happened. To me, it’s a little like watching a really bad football game. You watch it because your team is in it but you know you really should be doing something constructive with your time.

Yahoo is really more of an aggregator of news and their partnership with ABCNews makes them just a shill for that network and its coverage. They write some content but they draw most other content from the AP and a few other sources like Politico.com. What Yahoo brings to the table is interactive maps with projections (based on AP information of course) and other bells and whistles. The idea here is that people will be tracking the election outcome like a fantasy football team. I suppose even I will follow this thing but with a different eye than most. So you all know where I stand, I believe a politician is a politician is a politician regardless which side of the two party system you sit on. I think it will be most interesting to watch how different outlets try to spin things to set themselves apart from the rest of the crowd. The most likely victim in this whole thing will be the truth but, hey, who’s counting?

For Yahoo there is a lot at stake. Since it ranks among the top news sites on the net there are huge advertising dollars to rake in. Yahoo actually outperformed the MSNBC network of sites during the Olympics (which NBC televised so that shows how much people like the traditional networks). If Yahoo can set itself apart during this coverage it stands to help itself during a time when the news on Yahoo itself is not so good.

Here’s my question. Based on the banner year of ‘one time’ events like the Olympics and this campaign of Olympic marathon proportions what will Yahoo think it can get for advertising in the future? Will the numbers that this has generated (some projections place it at 3 times the volume following the last presidential election) translate into higher ad costs for advertisers or will the advertisers fight back with the argument that the numbers for 2008 are inflated? If I was an advertiser I would be fighting already. You know that Yahoo will make serious claims about its traffic etc but any thinking advertiser will ask them to get to the real numbers. Otherwise, they will be paying for phantom traffic based on a huge bubble created by this ‘event’. Should be interesting.

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