Kite & Key Media

The costliest ads

The highest-spend ad of each distinct text, as it ran.

• Are we Rome? Americans have spent generations asking that question. It turns out it’s the wrong one. Throughout our history, Americans have been haunted by a worry that the more powerful we become, the closer we get to an inevitable fall. So far, the worry has always been wrong — but someday it might not be. The question is how we’d even tell. In his 2025 book Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages, the scholar Johan Norberg examined seven of history’s golden ages

  1 June 2026 · Kite & Key Media · $6–7K · 450K+ impressions · Informational · Ad Library

• Presidents love to promise things like safer streets and better schools. But the history suggests there’s only so much they can do. Bill Clinton made one of the biggest federal pushes on crime in recent memory. Government auditors later concluded that his effort explained only a sliver of the drop in crime that followed. George W. Bush and Barack Obama both launched ambitious education initiatives, and test scores barely budged. That isn’t necessarily a sign that those presidents screwed up;

  21 October 2026 · Kite & Key Media · $3.5–4K · 500K+ impressions · Informational · Ad Library

• Are data centers draining our water and jacking up our electric bills? That’s the fear behind the nationwide backlash. But the numbers tell a much calmer story … at least for now. America has been building data centers since the late 1950s. They’re the internet’s engine room: AI runs on them, but so do video calls, online gaming, and the text you probably shouldn’t send your ex. What’s new is the backlash, driven mostly by fears about water and electricity. On water, the comparisons are reveal

  7 October 2026 · Kite & Key Media · $3.5–4K · 450K+ impressions · Informational · Ad Library

• Why is America always in the Middle East? There’s a serious argument that our national security interests require it. There’s an equally serious one that we should just wash our hands of the region. Both are a lot more complicated than they sound. Across decades of polling, nearly every American intervention in the Middle East has ended up unpopular with voters. The region’s not that popular with presidents either. Over the past 50 years, nearly every commander-in-chief’s plans for the region h

  23 September 2026 · Kite & Key Media · $3.5–4K · 500K+ impressions · Informational · Ad Library

• Is the middle class in terminal decline? That’s the story politicians often tell. But the data shows something more hopeful ... with a really big asterisk. Yes, the middle class is shrinking — but the reason isn’t what you’ve been told. Since 1971, most of the people who left it moved up, not down. Incomes rose in every bracket, and the price of everyday stuff collapsed. TVs now cost 97% less than they did in 2000 — and they no longer throw out your back. So, why does it feel harder to get by?

  9 September 2026 · Kite & Key Media · $3.5–4K · 500K+ impressions · Informational · Ad Library

• Roughly a third of Americans once told pollsters the government was hiding the truth about a plane crash in North Dakota. Small problem: there was no plane crash. Researchers invented it to see who would bite — and what they found says something useful about why a good cover-up story beats “nobody really knows.” Belief runs deep: one in four Americans say planes are spraying harmful chemtrails, nearly 40% think the government is hiding evidence of aliens, and 41% believe a single group secretly

  5 August 2026 · Kite & Key Media · $3.5–4K · 700K+ impressions · Informational · Ad Library