Blair Cottrell of the United Patriots Front. Credit:Jason South "This measure is preventative and while advertising is being withdrawn from some websites, the government will continue to communicate important messages to Australians with other means," he said. The government and its media buyer, Dentsu Mitchell, would continue to request updates from Google "on the steps being taken to mitigate risks", he added. People who upload videos to YouTube get paid for the number of views or through AdSense – the programmatic system. To receive the money they have to register for an account with Google and provide their name and address and possibly tax information, according to the AdSense sign up page. Payments can be made through electronic transfer, a wire transfer, cheque or Western Union.

Cancer Council ads appeared on the Breitbart News Network website due to programmatic advertising. The site has since been added to a blacklist. Thus theoretically, Google has a way of contacting the people that governments want to avoid funding. Google terminates the account of anyone it suspects is a foreign terrorist organisation, as long as someone has alerted them to it. So are terrorists making a lot of money from YouTube? A spokesman for the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre [AUSTRAC] said "terrorists and terrorist organisations raise funds from a variety of legitimate and/or illegitimate sources of income. This may include online advertising." "The Attorney-General's Department and law enforcement agencies also work with industry to limit access to and disrupt violent extremist propaganda online," he added.

Simon Norton of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute is an expert on terrorism financing. His recently published paper on disrupting extremist financing notes terrorist use social media to reach out to potential funders, or to create fake charities to solicit donations. "We saw no evidence of revenue generation through click-bait and on line for terrorism financing," he told Fairfax Media. However, he added that terrorist attacks have evolved in recent years to be smaller, "lone wolf" style operations, which are usually cheaper. But even if violent extremists are not using click revenues to scrape together funding for their next bomb attack, ideological extremists are doing quite well out of it. And this is where advertisers have to carefully decide what ideas they will and won't support. Some YouTubers like Millennial Woes – a Scotland-based video blogger who posts bigoted monologues – claim to be able to make a living from their posts, according to one expert on far right groups.

And in Australia groups like the far-right United Patriots Front use social media to reach out to supporters. "Blair Cottrell and the United Patriots Front use Facebook as their main platform, not YouTube. And while they have a real large audience and some of their Facebook videos reach millions, these are not monetised by them but rather by Facebook," another expert said.



The UPF has tried to use crowd funding to raise money, but these are usually shut down by appeals to the platform for breaches of terms of service, he added.



The problem with programmatic advertising is advertisers get no say on where their ads appear, unless the site is flagged or manually added to a blacklist. In November 2016 a Twitter account called Sleeping Giants was set up to alert American advertisers they might be funding far-right groups. "We are trying to stop racist websites by stopping their ad dollars. Many companies don't even know it's happening. It's time to tell them," Sleeping Giants stated. Lately they have been targeting Breitbart News Network, a US far-right news website responsible for publishing stories such as that former US President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower.

When Fairfax Media visited Breitbart.com the first ad that came up was for Australia's Cancer Council "Cancer Council weren't aware that our ads were appearing on this website and have since taken steps to exclude this specific domain," a spokeswoman said after being alerted by Fairfax Media. "Our ads won't appear on it going forward and we will continue to restrict placements on extreme content." She added the Cancer Council uses programmatic advertising that "allows us to target our ads to general audiences that we hope will find them of interest, rather than placing them directly on specific websites". "In this case, the advertisement appeared because either the visitor fell into one of a wide range of target segments, or has previously visited the Cancer Council website. We did not select to advertise on the website directly," she added.

And this highlights the problem of ads following an individual around the internet – advertisers have no control over where the individual will go. Loading But would Breitbart even be picked up by the software that avoids extremist sites? Its former executive chair, Steve Bannon, is now the White House Chief Strategist, and several former reporters are working in the Trump administration. The current Google boycott could be the start of the first big battle between mainstream commerce and niche media.