Everyone from Entertainment Weekly (which wrote, “blogs don’t equal bucks;” neither does the cover of EW, evidently) to Adotas (which said all the hype had “little effect on the actual box office numbers”) has been checking in. The conventional wisdom seems to be that the lack of a gigantic opening weekend for Snakes On A Plane should be a sobering wakeup call regarding the broad effectiveness of Internet marketing.

I disagree.

People are staying away from the movies in droves, but Snakes has pulled in more than $30 million so far. As you can see in this chart, that’s better than a lot of movies with better casts that received stronger traditional marketing support. Lucky Number Sleven, for example. Or Thank You For Smoking. Or A Prairie Home Companion.

The real comparison to be made, though, is probably between Snakes and Akeelah and the Bee.

In the squared circle of non-traditional movie marketing, it’s a battle of vipers vs. venti, of blogs vs. biscotti, of cobras vs. caffeine. Snakes had wall-to-wall blog buzz on thousands of Web pages while Akeelah had wall-to-wall promotions in nearly 8,000 Starbucks stores in the U.S.

The box office numbers to date find Akeelah at $18.8 million vs. Snakes’ $30 million.

I think New Line should double down and keep feeding the blog buzz for the DVD release. Why not have the DVD extras be focused almost entirely on the Web phenomenon? Why not feature some of the best user-generated content on the DVD? Why not go behind the scenes of the Internet-prompted reshoot?

Online buzz may not have made Snakes a giant blockbuster, but it probably saved it from languishing in the box office dregs of Slither, Doogal, and Phat Girlz. If New Line plays it right, it’s going to help the DVD do well, too.

Takeaway for marketers: Reports of the death of online marketing have been greatly exaggerated.

Whether you’re celebrating Labor Day by sitting in traffic, burning food on the barbeque or working on yet another holiday, enjoy it.

“Sneak peek annoys alphabet” headlines Variety, referring to a one-minute rough cut of a sex scene from Desperate Housewives posted on YouTube. But this one has all the earmarks of “hey, let’s use YouTube to build some grassroots buzz.”

Yahoo! News reported Friday that the clip was still available, but as of this morning it appears to have been removed. You can see the key line (“I don’t do that, I’m a Republican”) in this official promo clip.

Maybe it really wasn’t a contrived leak. It’s not as if Desperate Housewives needs YouTube buzz to build its ratings. But the general notion of YouTube as buzz-builder? I dunno … is it just me, or is it starting to feel like it’s jumping the shark already?

SEOmoz blog posted 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic the other day. It’s well worth reading, whether you blog or not, since a lot of the tactics apply to Web sites, too.

“Any job is hard if you care how it turns out, and easy if you don’t.”
—Hugh Laurie