ProxyMate.net

Adwords activism

One thing we noticed was a lot of blank space where the ads normally go on Google when you search on Conroy-related terms such as “stephen conroy filter“.

You can fill this space for a dime until someone else comes along and offers to pay more for it. For non-marketable search terms, this provides a real opportunity to people who have a message to sell.

So as long as you stick to the terms of service, and don’t defame anyone, you can paste pretty much any message you want there, for anyone who’s interested in Stephen Conroy to see.

The deal is basically that it will only cost you money if people click on your ad. So linking it to a really unattractive URL would probably help!

It seems we aren’t the only people who’ve thought of targeting Conroy’s search terms (although I think they are actually trying to attract traffic), so it will be interesting to see how this pans out, and whether Conroy eventually decides to spend some of his own money bidding against us (because I’m pretty sure he’s not allowed to spend yours this way).

Of course there are other tactics one could engage in, but I won’t go into them now… Whatever you do – please don’t click on those links!

Actually, if I see an ad on Google that I think is for a good cause – or even in a commercial context, if I’m not interested in buying anything from them but just want to look at what they do – I type the URL in manually. This way they don’t get charged. Seems fair. If I want to buy from them, on the other hand, I click.