Vigilantism isn't the answer. Visit the sites that publish good content and click on ads that peak your interest -- let the internet marketplace sort itself out.
Plus, 1 person doing this won't matter a bit. 10% of the people doing this probably still won't have much impact. And there's no way you can get 10% of the internet to do the same thing.
First off, shitty content sites don't sell ads directly (generally) anymore than good content sites do. The ads come through a network like AdSense which means all that will result in is the shitty content site getting a lot more money.
Second, it won't ruin online advertising if lots of people do this. At the end of the day all ads are converted to CPA and bid on accordingly. It's the only metric advertisers care about. They pay by CPM or CPC, which you can game by refreshing the page a bunch or clicking the ads, but the advertiser's cost will just adjust until they're effectively paying the same CPA. For instance, if half of all clicks suddenly become fraudulent, bids will decreases such that CPCs drop by half, resulting in the same amount of money changing hands.
The only real problem with click fraud is when it is applied independently to one advertiser but not the ones he's bidding against. For instance if a bunch of people click AT&T adds fraudulently but not Verizon. If the click fraud is spread evenly throughout the market it has no effect.
Why not automate it? And why not automate it for everyone else also?
How about writing a freeware system agent/daemon that would allow people to submit sites, and then everyone running that agent/daemon would automatically spider the site as one or more standard browser user-agents, so that the IPs would be different and couldn't be as easily blocked without blocking legitimate clicks. You could make it peer-to-peer and rate limiting so it wouldn't be blamed as a DoS attack client. OR allow it to do DoS non-rate limited attacks for some sites if enough clients feel that the site is nasty.
I've said time and again, users should be vote directly on ads. Not only will this allow those serving ads to target them better, it will also allow direct feedback on ads that are crappy in themselves.
As a side effect, this would generate reams of extremely valuable personalized data on users!
Google could modify Chrome, such that everything in the browser can be voted on. This alone would be a killer app for Chrome. (Come to think of it, they could even enable voting on UI features of the browser itself!)
Though it sounds like a good idea, I can't imagine that constantly voting on everything I see would improve my browsing experience. I mean, browsing can already be a huge time-suck: you want to add another step and tell me that it will eventually improve the ads on my pages? It's easier to just ignore them.
Hulu lets you say whether or not an ad is relevant, and although I often do vote, I'm not convinced it changes anything.
Imagine a special key on the keybord which, while held down, would cause a clickable positive/negative graphic to be overlaid on every onscreen element, be them in apps or the OS itself. The results would be magically packaged and routed to the appropriate developer.
I rather like the way that Facebook handles ads already. Ads can be upvoted, eported for being offensive, and how they are in general out of the way but often interesting (although that gets into the huge privacy issue.. but I can say I've gotten more use out of Facebook ads than anywhere else regardless..)
It wasn't all bad. I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed when I read it at 4am. Ignoring gov isn't an optimal solution for growing businesses. It's wishful thinking that wide scale social changes can happen outside of regulated areas.
I think the the problem with content-driven sites is that satisfied visitors more often than not simply close the tab/window once they are done; only a small percentage keep "foraging" for more good content. On the other had, as Direct Media discovered, decent but far from great content keeps visitors searching for more, so they are much more likely to click on an ad.
