The Chicago Tribune explains that the NRA got to work online by throwing some of their war chest funding into an advertising blitz in the days after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.
Within four days, though, the NRA had returned in force, increasing its advertising aggressively on Facebook, and spending so widely and indiscriminately that its ads on YouTube showed up on videos for school-age kids. According to a previously unpublished review by Pathmatics, a company that scrapes data from online ads, the NRA spent more than six times as much on digital ads after the Parkland shooting than it did in the weeks before it. Its average daily spending in the 24 days before Parkland was $11,300, according to Pathmatics. In the 24 days after its silent period, that average jumped to $47,300.
Nearly all of the increase was on social media, primarily Facebook, where the NRA took its spending from an average of $4,400 a day in the three weeks prior to Parkland to $34,000 a day in the three weeks after the silence. Florida was heavily targeted in the post-tragedy ad burst. The state went from ninth most targeted in January to third between mid-February and mid-March.
And if you thought the NRA might have tailored their message to come across remotely sympathetic, you would be wrong. According to the Tribune, the ads they pushed out were the same variety of rabid jingoistic cheerleading that they were promoting before the shooting in Parkland, Florida. And while it will likely be weeks or months before we get to see how much money the NRA quickly threw at conservative candidates across the country, in the wake of yet another rifle massacre, you can bet it was a lot more than they were planning on giving out in March and April.