This comes from a left-minded friend of mine who finds herself working indirectly for McCain-Palin — her marketing firm has a contract with the campaign. To save her soul, she passes on these pocket-picking tips:
If you have time to waste, and want to help the home team at no expense to you, here's a fun game to play:1. Surf the Internet (political sites are good), looking for McCain-Palin banner ads.
2. Click on them to open up the McCain-Palin website.
3. Close that site (Firefox works great since you can just open and close a new tab).
4. Repeat (even on the exact same site) until your fingers fall off.
McCain and Palin are buying those ads in either the CPM (cost per thousand) or CPA (cost per action) marketplace. If the URL that you see when the McCain Palin-site opens up contains the keyword Google, then it is likely CPA. That means the Repubs are literally paying the site owner (via Google’s marketplace) for your actual click. I’m guessing they’re spending at least a quarter per click.
If it is CPM, the cost to the bad guys is more indirect. In that case, your click will tell their automated buying systems that their ad is effective, and they’ll automatically buy more of them, even though the ads themselves weren’t actually as effective as the click counts suggest.
The goldmine is a McCain-Palin banner ad on a site you approve of — or even better, the site of a friend. Then you can actually engineer a payment almost directly from the GOP to someone you like.
The only risk is that a huge number of clicks would cause them to remove the site from their ad-buy rotation, but I seriously doubt they could catch that. Click fraud is extremely hard to prove. The algorithms are tune to catch robot/auto-scripted clicks, not private individuals.
Happy clicking!
In the past week, I've noticed nearly every leftish website is running an ad for Bill Shuster for Congress. Open it up and you get: http://www.billshusterforcongress.org/splash/shuster-economy.asp?cmp-GOOGLE-P-NEWS
Nowhere does it say that he's an incumbent Republican, which he is, or how he got his job, which was by inheriting it from his corrupt father. It's a very Republican rural Pennsylvania district that swoops hither and yon, wherever there are no people. It isn't my district, but I've met Tony Barr, his opponent, who struck me as sincere and hardworking.
So please do click this ad when you see it, which amounts to sending Tony Barr a contribution that costs you nothing. I hope Shuster is in a tight race that's making him spend wildly and hide his party affiliation.
Posted by: Joyful Alternative on October 16, 2008 9:05 PMI know that engaging in this activity is supposed to be more fun than knocking voters off the rolls or never laying off Bill Clinton, but I just can't get a thrill out of it. I wanna see some thieves prosecuted.
Posted by: Buck on October 17, 2008 7:38 AMBuck: I get your point, but I'm in need of a new hobby. So until I get appointed as New Jersey's secretary of state and get to fiddle with voter registration rolls, I'm going to do a fair amount of spiteful clicking (is that oxymoronic?).
Posted by: Grace Nearing on October 18, 2008 12:19 AMNo, Grace. I certainly understand the therapeutic effect of this activity. It is a form of self medication of which I am not opposed to in principle. I'm not a stockholder in Google so I can't get another the kind of therapeutic effect from it that I need right now either. The principal remedy that it might effect doesn't bother me for those who are in such need. But I do not own any stock in Google so the remedy would not effect the principal problem that I currently have. But I certainly realize that the nation does need some radical changes in its health care system so I am not opposed to it as a palliative remedy. It's a principal remedy for some, but for me, nor one that I agree to in principle, at least at this moment.
It doesn't fit well with my ideology, of which I claim none, but do have certain guiding tendrils for. But if it works for you, I'm not opposed to it, either for principal reasons or principle ones.
Although this can get rather confusing. I hope to make is more so when I do my Nina Simone post of which I mention in the post the follows this one, but right now I am suffering from severe back pain caused by a congenital problem aggravated by age and osteo arthritis. I need more than a palliative remedy and I am contemplating a surgical remedy for the spinal problem. A principal remedy would indeed work to remedy the situation if a competent surgeon were available, but I have much investigative work to do to solve that particular problem as well as some others that I am working on.
I hope this explanation cleared up my objection. If it did not, my next post with a Nina Simone song that will be included may make it more confusing, which will be part of my point. I may post it tomorrow or possibly Sunday.
Does that makes things clearer? It it does, please reread this answer as it isn't supposed to.