Burst Media's 'Thought Leaders" network: Grownups wanted

When the going gets weird, the weird... grow up? That's the bet Burst Media is making with its new Thought Leaders network.

Among advertisers online, where so much can be known about individual site visitors, demographic targeting is king and A/S/L information is mapped to every group from gamers to moms to trendsetters. Within the blog-advertising ecosystem, Burst Media puts together bundles of 100-200 sites that appeal to a particular demographic and sells ad space on those sites.

The new 140-site Thought Leaders bundle, however, doesn't look like the bundles you might first think of when you think of the Net's hot demographics (18-to-24-year-old male gamers! 18-24-year-old fashion-interested females! Anyone too young to remember Jimmy Carter!). It's older (35 and above), 60 percent male, affluent, and probably not reading much of Perez Hilton.

The economy and the election season are driving Thought Leaders to invest serious time online, says Burst Media president and CEO Jarvis Coffin, who like many of us is currently getting "bombarded with e-mails" from older siblings, parents or grandparents following current events with mouse pointers hovering over the forward-this button.

Thought Leaders are "older, retired, and investing their time online, trying to shape other people's opinions," says Coffin. There's no particular political sensibility making the biggest waves in the group, but Thought Leader thinking and choice of reading material is mainly mainstream -- "they're not crackpots," as he puts it.

The Net has made such people more eager to share their opinions, Coffin says, noting that as the current economic crisis unfolds, "I've been exposed to content and blogs I didn't know existed -- some pretty cerebral stuff." And the mix, he says, is heady for readers of a certain age: "I don't know why we didn't [create] Thought Leaders first, really."