Back in 2005, I figured out that if I sent George W. Bush a $10 donation, his campaign would spend many dollars more than that on mailing me junk. It was a sort of reverse donation, losing the Bush campaign money.
In 2012, your connections to family and friends have been similarly “monetized.” Deep-pocketed corporations and mysteriously-funded Super PACs pay Facebook anywhere from $1 to $3 every time that someone visiting Facebook to check in on friends clicks on one of their advertisements instead. The social media monetizing industry calls it a “cost per click.” The corporations and the Super PACs bet that they can get you to spend lots of money — or win your vote — if they can click on those advertisements.
This presents you with a delicious opportunity, as Joshua Budden pointed out yesterday. Every now and then, if you use Facebook, be sure to click on the advertisements of the corporations and big-money political operations that you most despise. Congratulations! You’ve just lost them a few bucks.
It won’t end war. It won’t right the scales of justice. But it will throw a little sand in the gears. It will kick the shins of the big nasty operators. It won’t cost you anything, and it will feel really good.
Despise and conspire to destroy. Put more hard working Americans out of work. Nice.
Why, Jeff. You inspire me to wring my hands and cackle! I only need a minion to make the setting complete.
Am I a beast of schadenfreude? Sure. Spite? Yes, indeedy. But putting more hard working Americans out of work? It is to laugh. This would move money out of the plush advertising budgets of corporations and Super PACs without violating any rules or laws. If you want to wail and gnash your teeth over that, then be my guest. Please send me a video of your gnashing for my enjoyment.
Really, Jeff, we’ve already documented the kind of terrible low wage work that goes on at Super PACs (see http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/2012/08/04/concerned-american-voters-super-pac-pays-its-workers-terrible-wages/ ), and the terrible pay and working conditions at fast food restaurants like Chick-Fil-A are well-documented. On the other hand, pay at for entry level work at advertising agencies is a bit higher. So, we’re taking money from bad employers who provide bad jobs and transferring it to better employers who provide better jobs.
I’ve been doing this for years. Cost-per click is now the dominant (indeed, almost exclusive) business model in web advertising. Seldom discussed is that this turns web ads into a voting system, where you can vote FOR an advertiser (click and buy), AGAINST an advertiser (click and don’t buy), or abstain (don’t click). Good? No. Evil? No. It is what it is; just another aspect of the brave new world the web provides…and one which advertisers and commercial channels would rather you didn’t discuss or even think about. But they created the system, not me.
Eat more beef (or whatever, dude), but click more Chick-fil-A…and Romney, and Georgia-Pacific (the Koch brothers). I could go on and on. Actually, it would be kind-of interesting to organize a web-wide click-in on some of these clowns.
Bill, I agree with you: the system is what it is. It’s set up by corporations who want to use it to exploit our human behavior to generate revenue for themselves, but no rule demands that it be used in such a way. People may creatively use the system to their own ends, and that is not evil — it’s independent.
I’m curious about how your idea of “organizing a web-wide click-in” would work. Would it involve posting notice somewhere that there’s an advertisement available for people to click, calling on them to click it, and descending upon the advertisement to generate advertising costs?
I rarely visit Facebook or other social media. I do the clicking from time-to-time from web pages, usually news sites. Is there a general answer to the question of how much this costs the advertiser? If it’s a penny or two, I won’t bother. If it’s a dollar or two, it’s a great idea. In between, it depends how busy I feel. And if the money just shifts from from one bad player to another, I wouldn’t bother then, either.