The Internet allows you to protest directly against unethical advertisers by clicking on ads you don’t like.
Traditionally people have protested against hate media such as Michael Savage’s radio show by encouraging people to boycott advertisers on the show. The problem is this is indirect. Without direct penalties, shows like Savage’s actually rely on the ‘all publicity is good publicity’ phenomenon of having large audiences of people who listen just to be outraged. Advertisers gravitate towards low end brands where negative feelings against them are outweighed by the fact that some percentage of overall listeners will convert to buyers.
It occurred to me that the Internet allows you to do something much more direct, to penalize advertisers by clicking on text ads and not buying anything. This doesn’t just lower revenues it actually costs the advertiser directly. The ‘all publicity is good publicity’ goes away.
One could go one step further and encourage people to gang together and click on certain ads in the manner of an ad busting flashmob.
For example, Steve Rhodes emailed me today to point out that Michael Savage:
“came back from his vacation early to rant on his show that not one penny should go to the tsunami victims. He also implied it might be punishment by god of Muslims along with men who went to Thailand to have sex with children.” (Steve said he will post a transcript on his blog)
Now Amazon know that Michael Savage’s book sold a reasonable number of copies, so they bid on the phrase ‘Michael Savage’ on Overture and link to his book.
If enough people were to search for Michael Savage on Yahoo, click on the Amazon ad and not buy anything then Amazon would soon drop the ad.
Of course, I would not encourage anyone to do this now.