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Comment by jbandela1 | Hacker News Reader

One way to possibly fix this might be to start a #NoBloodMoney movement that would target advertisers who advertise in news segments about events where people have died.

People's deaths should not be used by the media company to make money, nor should people's deaths be used to try to generate interest in your product.

If enough people targeted the advertisers ("Ever since watching an ad for <your product> during a news segment about <an event in which somebody died> I just associate <your product> with death and sadness"), I think we could get the media companies to stop running an excess of these kinds of stories.

#NoBloodMoney - media companies should not profit off of other's misery.

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If this works at all, it's likely to work to well, in that news outlets will tend to suppress stories because they mention suffering. Some of those stories are actually important. There's probably no easy solution; balanced news is probably not a stable equilibrium.

Human misery isn't something most companies want to be associated with. For that reason, many companies don't want their ads to run next to content like that. I've personally had to quickly pull ads off a site because of that fact.

I've been occasionally fascinated that newspapers don't have a flag in their CMSs for articles that are crass to plaster with ads.

The New York Times seems to do this:

http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/an-ad-blocker-for-tragedies...

If a story is marked as sensitive, an option is set and ads aren't shown on it.

The Guardian has this too. And I've done this on a few sites I've worked with as well.

We developed that flag after the incident I referred too.

I like your idea. I've felt this way for years. The news uses people's death and suffering to get eyeballs on advertisements.

> #NoBloodMoney - media companies should not profit off of other's misery.

What about informing the public, though? The logical conclusion to this idea is that news organisations will have less incentive to cover news stories that result in human death. Is that really what we want?

Incidentally, a number of news organisations already have a CMS flag for content of this nature anyway, which in many ways presents more problems - how tragic is sufficiently tragic to block ads?

The real problem here is profit-based news. The answer is already out there in the form of the BBC and other public news outlets that do not depend on advertising. Alas, the US is not coming close to such a model any time soon.

Gmail did something like this back when it had ads. If it detected an email related to a death, it would attempt to block related ads from displaying above the content, so you didn't get pestered with ads for funeral services while receiving news of a loved one's death. From my understanding, it didn't always work, but was an interesting first step.

I don't know if other Google services now incorporate similar behavior.

(This is the earliest reference I can find to the behavior: http://staugustine.com/stories/060504/bus_2366168.shtml)

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