I noticed an ad for the Jim Inhofe 2008 campaign website. Having remembered that Jim Inhofe is an absolutely horrible repug senator (especially when it comes to theenvironment), I was a little confused as to why the hell he was advertising on dKos?
It turns out that some of the advertisements on dKos are from Google AdSense. This is a service that crawls a webpage that has sold advertisement space to Google to try to find matches between the given webpages content and all the advertisers who use Google.
I'm sure that there have been more than a few diaries blasting Senator Inhofe for his awful voting record and untenable political stances which have been picked up by Google's crawler. The crawler doesn't take into account if a webpage is "for" or "against" a particular advertiser, it just looks for hits; this has to be the case, or why would the Inhofe ad be there?
After a quick peak at Google's Ad's page, it shows that pages displaying the ads are payed on a per click basis. That's right. Each time you see the Inhofe 2008 on dKos and click it, dKos should get a couple cents (I'm sure one of the admin types could actual give us an accurate amount per click). I'm not sure about things like multiple clicks from the same IP address, or other actions that might only generate payment for one click.
In the future I think I might take a second or two and look at the ads on dKos (yes I still get to see the ads, because I'm a cheapskate), and if I see an ad that's obviously for a cause I don't agree with, I will click it!!! And then promptly close the corresponding page, knowing that I just took a couple cents away from a lunatic and gave it to dKos.