Forbes.com, the online arm of the right-wing business magazine, is offering to pay blogs to run a political ad supporting a ban on gay marriage. The price: $2.85 per thousand pageviews. The ad advocates the passage of Proposition 8, a California ballot initiative. The blogs in question are part of Forbes's Business and Financial Blog Network, an online-ad network which places ads sold by Forbes salespeople on independent sites. The network itself is run by Adify, an ad-technology company now owned by Cox, the media-and-cable-TV conglomerate. The ad won't run automatically, according to an email from Sharon Gitelle, who's listed on Forbes.com as a "membership" contact; bloggers must specifically choose it. Politics aside, a $2.85 CPM, or cost per thousand pageviews, is nothing to sneeze at in these tough economic times. Reached on the phone, Gitelle said, "I'm not talking to Valleywag." So we know this much: She's no dummy! Here's the email she sent:

The news of Adify's $300 million sale was likely the first time most had heard of the online-advertising company. The San Bruno startup was so obscure that Silicon Alley Insider, which first aired the rumor of a sale did not include Adify in its list of the 25 most valuable startups. The price cable-and-newspapers conglomerate Cox paid for the startup would otherwise qualify it for that list. Ad networks, which allow advertisers to buy and publishers to sell ads across multiple websites, have become faddish; and Adify, which allowed anyone to launch a network of their own, caters expertly to that fad.