Mean, rotten, nasty underhanded kinda idea...

[bogie]

Which means I kinda like it...

I'm guessing that some of the anti-gun folks may budget a certain amount for services like Google's adwords... You click on the ad, they pay.

Get an idea where I'm going with this?

Try a google search on "gun violence."

 

[hso]

Don't be coy, spell it out.

Are you saying that google's adwords will cost gun prohibitionists if they are set up with google for the service?

 

[Standing Wolf]

Mean, rotten, nasty underhanded kinda idea...
Which means I kinda like it...

I was starting to fear I might be the only person here with a perverse sense of humor.

 

[AZ_Rebel]

A related story....

A number of years ago a Canadian University professor named Wendy Cukier started a group called COALITION for Gun Control to lobby for stricter gun control. This group sent out requests for funds and enclosed a Postage Paid Envelope.
Some enterprising soul photocopied the envelope on the top half of a sheet of paper and on the bottom half typed a suggestion that gun owners may want to send a brick to contribute to a new building for the organization - using the prepaid address label.
The initiative was called "Bricks for Wendy" and a few copies of this sheet were left at a local Gun Control meeting. Within a week this sheet was all over Canada and people were sending not only bricks but whatever caught their fancy. One guy put a tag on an engine block, stapled on a "Postage Paid Return Sheet" from the photocopy and sent it. Reports of dirty underwear and even more imaginative things also surfaced.
The Coalition for Gun Control never revealed how much their postage bill was but it was rumored to be close to half a million dollars.
Now that was a Mean, rotten, nasty underhanded kinda idea...

 

[quatin]

Set your budget
There's no minimum spending requirement--the amount you pay for AdWords is up to you. You can, for instance, set a daily budget of five dollars and a maximum cost of ten cents for each click on your ad.

 

[41magsnub]

Quatin has it right, my company deals with this for a number of customers. Unless they are stupid this won't do much. About the most damage it could do is eat up the adword budget early and reduce their exposure.

 

[bogie]

Hso, I'm sorta hoping that the few folks who click on the Activism forum aren't the same mouthbreathers who seem to be hanging out elsewhere...

And it appears that they don't necessarily need stuff spelled out for them... I guessed right...

eat up the adword budget early and reduce their exposure.

Well, that does sorta cause a nice warm feeling, even if it's a little one...

 

[Chuck Dye]

Reminds me of WATS line assaults. Use a pay phone to dial an adversary's toll free number and know 1)your call is nearly untraceable to you and b)the receiver of the call pays an additional cost for the pay phone, $0.28 last I heard, beyond normal WATS fees.

Good fun? Yup!

Satisfying? Ooooh, yah!

Richly deserved? Possibly that, too.

High road? Not even close.

 

[bogie]

Then we probably shouldn't suggest that people check to see if any of the gun control organizations have 800 numbers, because that could be a Bad Thing.

Sometimes bad things just feel nice tho...

Probably wouldn't be nice to see if we could get a few hundred folks to call a particular organization, and ask about something minor, enough to get them to get someone to talk to you... Have them start calling about about 8:00 a.m., and space each of them about a minute or two apart...

That'd be one office that wouldn't get ANYTHING done all day...

"Hello - is this the Obama campaign headquarters? Oh good... Who do I talk to about a donation?"

 

[Chuck Dye]

Now there is a left handed compliment...

 

[Chuck Dye]

Found it! And it's only five years old.

 

[bogie]

I think that technique is a little tacky. This is supposed to be the High Road. What if the Brady folks had all their members flood this site with posts, consuming all the available bandwidth?

I think they -have- been... Signal to noise ratio has been a trifle ugly as of late...

I think the Mexican grocery just up the street has a pay phone...

 

[jdege]

while true
do
   wget http://www.google.com/search?q=gun+violence
   sleep 1
done

 

[redneckdan]

what the heck does that^ do?

 

[WayneConrad]

You can distract yourself with playing dirty games against the other side. And in so doing, sully our reputation and harm our cause.

Or you can get busy with real activism.

 

[CZ-100]

I couple times a month, I spend some time and send back lots of my junk mail.

I just put other company's mailings in different envelops and send them back, postage paid by them.

I have been doing this for years

 

[misANTHrope]

Yup, doing this will not really serve to drive up their costs unless they run really high budgets. Even if your daily Adwords spending surpasses your budgeted amount, all you get billed for is the actual budget amount. So worst case, you use up their budget early in a day.

About the only real effect I see this having is maybe keeping impressionable people from seeing the ads.

Finally, this:

while true
do
   wget http://www.google.com/search?q=gun+violence
   sleep 1
done

achieves nothing. Impressions are free, you only pay when someone clicks on an ad.

 

[RyanM]

I remember hearing rumors that Google refuses to accept advertizements from gun and knife related companies (and I've yet to see any gun or cutlery ads while searching). If that's true, it wouldn't surprise me if the gun control bozos are getting free adspace, making a clicking campaign pointless.

 

[bogie]

Hey, everyone needs a hobby.

Oh, wait a minute.

Any effort expended is useless. I know that now.

Just go ahead and take your guns down to the steel plant.

 

[Robert Hairless]

Bogie, on the high road there are a great many good reasons for not acting and only one good reason for acting.

 

[misANTHrope]

Hey, everyone needs a hobby.

Oh, wait a minute.

Any effort expended is useless. I know that now.

Just go ahead and take your guns down to the steel plant.

I'm very sorry that your idea is nigh on pointless. I apologize for providing the knowledge I have gained through managing Adwords accounts, and I definitely apologize for Google not setting the system up so that you can cost the antis lots of money. But if you want to waste your time on something trivial like this,then go for it. As for me, I'll spend my time on efforts that I actually believe to be constructive.

By the way, a Google search for "gun violence" shows what look to be maybe five advertisers, none of which appear anti to me.

 

[jdege]

Finally, this: ... achieves nothing. Impressions are free, you only pay when someone clicks on an ad.

Not a problem.

DL the results page, parse the html to locate the ad links, then DL the ad pages.

It's 10-lines of shell script, instead of 3.

I checked - the URLs for the ads point to Google, so DLing them directly, instead of as a link on the search results page, should still count as a hit.

 

[misANTHrope]

Except the ad links appear to be uniquely autogenerated for each search instance... so I suspect that visiting the same link over and over wouldn't get counted as multiple hits. That's just my impression from looking at the code, though.

 

[Sungun09]

Goog

Google was sued a couple of years ago because they were not negating multiple hits from the same IP .

After all, they made money from the hits whether or not they were legit. I believe Google settled..

 

[atk]

Ya know, I haven't really thought that this thread was high road from the beginning. With cpttango30's recommendation of illegal actions, it's become decidedly NOT high road.