In the discussion on yesterday's post Brian Tomasik wondered if we could get a good estimate for the number of vegetarians created per facebook ad click by counting the number of "I'm never eating meat again!" comments. How common is this?

I picked three landing pages for veg ads and looked at the 100 most recent comments ("reverse chronological" sort) [1]. I found:

ag-laws.info

going vegan	3
going vegetarian	0
eat less meat	2
other	95

www.whosagainstanimalcruelty.org

going vegan	0
going vegetarian	22
eat less meat	5
other	73

hiddenfaceoffood.com

going vegan	0
going vegetarian	6
eat less meat	0
other	94

Most of the posts for ag-laws are "stop animal abuse", "this is sad", or "poor pigs". The few who mention veg*ism are mostly not saying they're going veg because of this but that they're already veg. On whosagainst there's much more about personally becoming vegetarian, still a lot of "how can people do this". On hiddenface they're more like "this is terrible", "sick".

These videos seem to vary hugely in their responses, with the "from farm to fridge" video on whosagainst getting a much larger veg-comment fraction. On the other hand, perhaps one of the other videos gets many more people to comment? We don't actually care about the comment fraction; the fraction that matters is the visitor fraction. Really, the end goal is the number who say they're giving up meat per $1 spend in advertising.

This still doesn't give us a way to deal with the possibility Wayne brought up that I wrote about in my last post: what if we're just measuring vegetarians drifting in mostly for other reasons and aren't measuring vegetarians drifting out because they don't "like" or comment?

(Some of the comments are pretty silly: "we have to eat meat to survive if not animals wiil take over", "not EVERY single person in the world will go vegan if we do we will have an over population of animals", "Become a vegetarian and your worst enemy then becomes Monsanto and the antibiotics (such as Glyphosate) that are sprayed indiscriminately on our crops", "That's why the cost of fruits, vegetables and grain products has skyrocked, the world can not sustain humanity on a vegetarian diet. People all over the world are dying because of drought conditions brought on by over farming the land.")

[1] When people made multiple comments I tried to count that as only one.