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"Small" is a relative term. A $15500 full page ad in PCGamer magazine might be pretty small for a commercial company, but there's no way a completely free hobbyest mud could justify that sort of expenditure. Start tacking on $1100 Dragon magazine adverts and smaller monthly adverts in various other printed magazines, and you're talking about a considerable amount of promotion to an otherwise mostly non-mudding audience.
Obviously if you gave a text-based mud the advertising budget of World of Warcraft or EverQuest it would gather even more attention, but I doubt that even a highly successful commercial mud could gather enough players to make that sort of advertising campaign pay off.
However it still provides some interesting food for thought, in my opinion. If a few thousand dollars of well-placed advertising can make generic gameplay, repetitive grind and stock features look so tempting, it paints a brighter future for those who are developing high quality original games.
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