In an election when the two parties combined spent almost $2 billion, I'm not particularly concerned with an alleged ad buy of "thousands of dollars per month" [1] The same group, by the way, which was promoting "Not My President" stories after the election. [2] This is a story of Russia sowing discord, but since the MSM played directly into their hands in that regard, they don't want to report it accurately.
Even 538 [3] can't get it right. In their analysis of whether IRA had any impact on the election ("Who Can Say?") they claim the IRA had a monthly operating budget the equivalent of $1.25 million USD. In fact what the indictment actually claims is;
"By in or around September 2016, the ORGANIZATION’s monthly budget for Project Lakhta submitted to CONCORD exceeded 73 million Russian rubles (over 1,250,000 U.S. dollars), including approximately one million rubles in bonus payments" [4]
But in the paragraph immediately above;
"CONCORD funded the [IRA] as part of a larger CONCORD-funded interference operation that it referred to as “Project Lakhta.” Project Lakhta had multiple components, some involving domestic audiences within the Russian Federation and others targeting foreign audiences in various countries, including the United States."
So when 538 writes "The indictment alleges that an organization called the Internet Research Agency had a monthly budget of approximately $1.25 million toward interference efforts by September 2016" this is simply false. In a story attempting to assess the reach and impact of Russian interference in the election, IMO this is a fatal flaw in their reporting.
Now that the "collusion" narrative is dead, the new buzzword is "interference". But personally I'm not convinced "thousands of dollars of ad spend" are convincing evidence of interference. No doubt Russia loves sowing discord in the US and has done so for decades. The story simply hasn't lived up to the narrative, and it's playing into Russia's hand to try to make it bigger than it really was.
I guess maybe we're just about ready to move on from anger to bargaining. Really, this has gone on long enough.
[1] - https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4380504/The-Speci... -- Paragraph #35 on Pg 14
[2] - Indictment, Paragraph #57
[3] - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-did-russian-in...
[4] - Indictment, Paragraph #11(b)