Q: What’s the difference between a fanatic and a zealot?
A: A zealot can’t change his mind. A fanatic can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
~ Winston Churchill

We indeed love Winston Churchill.

It’s not too often we link to one of our zealot friends, but we do today to prove a point (and further explain why we used the quote above). Well-known industry blogger Paperghost wrote something today on his blog that moved him “up” the ladder from zealot to fanatic. See his post: http://www.vitalsecurity.org/2005/12/adware-ku-klux-slam.html. Others have since joined him.

For the longest time, Paperghost and others have taken great pleasure in making noise about unauthorized installations of our software by rogue distributors guilty of defrauding us and irritating our users (potential and actual). But the changes we’ve made over the last several months to our distribution model and our technology have made these rogue installations so infrequent that the true fanatics have been in search of something else to gripe about.

Paperghost and other fanatics, after months and months of saying we don’t provide any content in exchange for showing ads, now object to the content we do provide. But it’s selective objection of course because, in the words of Winston Churchill, a fanatic won’t change the subject. We are called out as evil for allowing the webmaster of www.theamazingracist.net to offer our search software to his customers as a way to monetize his content.

(For the record, “The Amazing Racist is a comedy routine done by Ari Shaffir, a Jewish would-be comedian.” Mr. Shaffir portrays himself as a “blatant racist” in order to “film people’s reactions.”  Wikipedia’s entry on Mr. Shaffir is linked here.)

An even more interesting thing is that a simple Google search for that same video in question yields seven unique sites where this video is located, all on the first page. All of them are ad supported in some way including the wildly popular site IFilm. So what gives? Are Dumpalink, IFilm and all the others evil too? Why aren’t these fanatics writing blogs about Comedy Central’s support of South Park, a show that routinely mocks religions, races, and disabilities? Because they have set up a different set of rules that 180solutions should abide by…a set of rules that makes it so the fanatics don’t have to change the subject.

We are in business to create the online content economy by providing consumers access to the “long tail” of content (videos, software, music, games, etc.), for free, while providing a means to those who create the content and have web traffic to make money from it. Ads are simply the way the long tail is funded. To make the advertisements more user-friendly and actually additive to the experience, we “time-shift” them away from the free content to the time when such ads will be most relevant to the user: when he or she is searching online.

We are not in the business of censoring content so that only the universally popular content gets seen. We leave that job up to the big portal sites. While we welcome wildly popular content, we follow the Ebay (link), and Amazon (link) model: provide access to content, that as weird or offensive as it might be (think of the Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich) to “mainstream” people, it is sought by some group of people out there.

We don’t know what kind of content our fanatical friends prefer, but we’re pretty sure that we have something they like. All they have to do is download Zango.