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Google Ad-words Poetry Project
hecticjames writes "Cute idea - buying google adwords to place poetry. The site also includes google's response." The page is a really interesting look into Google's
text ad service, and has a lot of interesting statistics about the relative
value of art and porn. It's really worth a read.
is that Google is trying to keep out spam and other forms of evil ads and only let people who want to follow some basic rules that increase the value of the ads advertise. To the folks at google thanks.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Since from when, has the automatic answer based on some mathematical formula been a "response". Duh, even thou this is quite interesting, i wonder what parts the original poster did *not* read..
yush
... Google aren't really expecting people to post stuff that isn't an ad. So the automated systems are geared towards advertisers. Of course they would be. If Google must have ads, what they want is to make 'em useful and as relevant as possible to the search.
It strikes me as a little bit silly of the artist to complain that Google removed these ads. They were completely irrelevant and attracting no clickthroughs, and so an automated system removed them. As far as I can tell the whole thing was entirely automatic.
How can a robot be expected to tell the difference between 'net-art', a poorly written ad, and a downright deceitful ad? It can't. Big surprise there, then...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
How can anything that happened here be construed as censorship?
AdWords are for ads, not poetry. Google has every right to maintain an advertising system that maximises advertising effectiveness and revenue.
If Google wants to set up a system for serving targetted poetry, they will do so.
The thing that strikes me most is how different this is from advertising on tv and radio. On tv, the ad rate is based on how many people watch the show, what its rating is. An ad during a popular prime-time show costs more money than an ad at 3 in the morning. But the tv companies don't care what you put in your ad. They are selling you one shot at reaching your audience. If you blow it, they don't care. They only time they care is if you try to show something like an ad from adbusters that might actually suggest that people not spend money they don't have on crap they don't need. But if you want to be silly, so what?
/. to find news about InterSystems. But people who visit google are there looking for something.
Because google gets paid not by the number of people that see the ad but by the number of people that follow it, their concern is with getting people to click the ad.
If google were to sell ads like tv (and who is to say they shouldn't), they would charge based on the number of searches you want to be linked to. If there are 1,000,000 searches on "soda pop" a day, then charge every one who wants an ad to show up then $100, and it is up to you to make your ad work within their guidelines.
In some ways, this makes more sense. Within the rules for google's text ads, why should they take the risk that your marketing drones can get out a decent ad. Because that is the risk they are assuming now. And that's why there is this automated system that checks click throughs.
From a business perspective, you want to accept as little risk as possible, especially for things you can't control.
The flip side of this coin is that google doesn't want the value of their ads to drop. No one who has been on the net for more than 5 minutes pays attention to the hit the monkey ads or the ads that rotate around slashdot. Why? Because they are often random and have little relationship to the page we are visiting or the reason for our visit. At least that's how it seems to me. I certainly don't visit
So maybe google wants to make sure that the ads are relevant because it doesn't want to accept the risk that its ads will considered worthless, thus dropping the price they can charge for them.
Again, this is the reverse of the way it works on tv. Advertisers will drop a show because they don't want to be associated with its message. Look at the companies that pulled advertisements from Ellen because she came out. But when was the last time you heard of a show not accepting a willing advertiser with cash money? Besides the adbuster ads of course.
With google, we get the reverse. It's like having UPN saying no ads for depends diapers during Buffy:TVS because the ads are unrelated to the show and the ads will cause the value of the show to drop. They don't care if you think that a lot of young people will rush out and buy depends. As long as your check clears.
Is it right? FIIK. It's a balancing act between losing your good name and generating revenue efficiently.