[franze]

i have some doubts

in it's simplest form an add network has 4 participants

* advertiser (the one who pays the bills, and wants to sell stuff to customer)

* add network (provides the infrastructure and the network of publishers, has bills to pay)

* publishers (which sell their screen real estate and want money from the add network in return)

* user (pot. customer, must click on the adds, valuable for the advertiser only if he buys something from him)

the thing is, the user is only valuable to the advertiser if he becomes a customer - if the user clicks just because he "wants to do some good" he is not as valuable as user who clicks because of "honest interrest" on the add.

so basically this systems needs to find publishers which want less money from their screen real estate because the advertisers will definitiv not be willing to pay as high prices for that "goody two shoes" traffic than they would for other "better qualified" traffic.

one more thing: i once worked with a startup which wanted to do the same thing with banner (and in-email) adds - and lets just say: i will never work in the charity vertical ever again.

[jannes]

But is that much different from now? There are already a couple of reasons why someone would click on an ad without "honest interest".

I, for example, sometimes click on ads from companies I don't like, so that they have to pay for the click. Everytime I see an ad for Microsoft, Oracle or something along those lines I like to click on it to punish them a little for being stupid (in my opinion). I can't be the only one who does that?

I wonder why Anonymous hasn't picked that technique up as an alternative to DDoS. Maybe it's not effective enough, I'm not sure. But in the end I have better things to care about.

[calbear81]

When you click on an ad to "punish" the advertiser, you are doing one of a few things that are really counter-productive to what you're trying to do:

1) You're rewarding the advertiser by implying interest in what they have pitched, therefore encouraging them to blast you with more ads.

2) Assuming you're not using AdBlock, you've probably just added yourself to a much more targeted cookie pool of "people who are interested in Microsoft because they clicked". Enjoy the MS ads that will now follow you all over the web through one of the many behavioral retargeting networks.

3) You did nothing to hurt MS because they bought based on CPM so the impression was paid for in the first place, clicks don't hurt them.

4) You hurt the site you saw the ad on. Let's assume this site is a site you visit frequently. People click but no one buys, the ad agency compares the performance on this site vs. others with a less punishing audience, and decide that the money is better spent elsewhere thus depriving this site of much needed ad revenue.

[subpixel]

The best punishment is to ignore them. They can afford your click, and worse - they interpret it as approval/reward.

[deniz]

Thanks for your feedback. I do believe however, even if some clicks are just not for "honest interest", the extra exposure would still have a value to the advertiser.

Also many companies do place value on appearing socially responsible.

[danielharan]

You're doing it wrong.

Few people click and it's mostly poor, uneducated customers. Your customers will be cheap-ass direct response marketers that can't compute a confidence interval.

Click-based attribution is fundamentally broken, and the market is moving away from that. Haven't you done any customer development with marketers!?