In an election year already dominated by Internet fundraising, a new idea has emerged: customized toolbars that generate revenue from searches and online sales. The GOP, not necessarily on the cutting-edge of all-things-Web, has cut a deal (see WSJ, TechPresident) with a company called Free Cause to provide a toolbar that enables users to donate to the GOP "without opening your wallet."
Each Yahoo search conducted on the toolbar will kick a few cents (presumably $.023) back to the Republican National Committee, with 1% to 8% of the online sales conducted through the toolbar going to RNC. Wondering how much this kind of toolbar fundraising could generate? Let's see, according to the most recent Comscore stats, Yahoo accounted for 2.2 billion U.S. searches per month.
Assuming that Republicans and Democrats engage in the same amount of searching per month (an assumption that could be wrong, given the big-D Democratic tilt of the Internet) and that 40% of searchers identify as Republicans, that would mean Republicans account for 880 million of Yahoo's searches. Assume further that 5% of those Republican searches flow from the customized toolbar (110 million searches).
At $.023 per search, the monthly revenue generated by the toolbar would be around $2.5 million. On an annual basis, that's about $30 million, or just under a third of the $95 million cash on hand the RNC reported earlier this month. This estimate covers only search revenue and doesn't include the shopping sales splits.
It's not clear to me what safeguards are in place to prevent abuse of this system. What's to stop a hardcore group of operatives from ginning up millions of phony searches just to generate revenue from the GOP?
If Google, which accounts for 6.7 billion U.S. searches per month or over three times the number of Yahoo searches, were to agree to a similar deal with the DNC (the political license rights for the technology is owned by a former McCain strategist who under FEC rules is apparently obligated to license it to Democrats too), the fundraising capability of this tool could fatten the coffers of Democrats to the tune of $60 million per year (assuming that Dems account for 60% of searches).
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:43 PM | Print | Comments (1)I'm a little late on this (and so many other things) but on Tuesday New York Governor David Paterson signed into law a bill aimed at cracking down on video game violence and shielding children from exposure to violent video games. So, why hasn't there been the usual outcry from civil libertarians about flagrant infringement of our First Amendment rights? Unlike all other state-level legislation that seeks the same ends, this bill will probably go unchallenged, and if a lawsuit is filed, will probably withstand legal challenges...because it's toothless.
As Joystiq columnist and gaming association editor Dennis McCauley noted last month, the video game industry probably won't drag this bill into court because it's "largely symbolic" and "impotent."
First, the bill requires video game makers to build in parental controls, which the Wii, Xbox 360 and Playstation already do. The bill also calls for the formation of an advisory council to study the impact of violent media and make recommendations on ratings.
The only insulting aspect of the bill is that the advisory council is charged with setting up a parent-teacher awareness to identify and help students who may have a propensity toward violence. By including this provision in a video gaming statute, the law seems to equate violent kids with video games. But insults are not necessarily unconstitutional, so even this aspect of the bill is relatively harmless.
For these reasons, McCauley says the bill will smack the industry "with all the force of marshmallows." The logical question then is: why even bother with such useless legislation? So far as I can tell, a much stronger version of the bill had been championed by now-disgraced former governor Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer decided to tone down the most controversial aspects of the bill to ensure its passage and then resigned from office.
The bill kept had some sort of momentum propelling it thanks to sponsor Sen. Andrew Lanza (R-Staten Island). Now it's New York law.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:38 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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