solanasaurus.com

Paying for content on the web is pretty unpopular these days. Luckily for free content providers, ad sales online seem to be picking up. Lots of bloggers, non-profit websites and others, put free Google Ads or similar money-earning services on their sites. The user agreement for Google Ads (and probably others too) stipulates you aren’t allowed to ask people to click on them. That makes sense to avoid cheating. But isn’t it funny how no one seems to think of clicking on ads as a free form of charity?

In the past weeks, I have very unscientifically been asking friends who work in media and on the web, whether they ever consciously click on ads of the websites they like to read in order to help support them. So far everyone has said no. I don’t actually do it myself either.

Years ago, the Hunger Site (a website of GreaterGood) started getting people to click on ads, by promising to sponsor “a cup of rice” to the UN world food program. It was a runaway success, and they have since expanded to other issues like breast cancer, child health, literacy, the environment and animal rescue. The principle is simple, everybody gets it.

There is so much impetus on the side of the media companies and advertisers to lure people to click on their ads. Services like Revver (for profit sharing on online video) have built whole businesses around it. But so far, I haven’t heard of any reader’s movement to help fund their favorite websites by purposefully clicking on and looking at automatically generated ads. Why not? If people genuinely look at the ads it seems to work to everyone’s best interest.