Slashdot Mirror
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.
Uh huh.. And in other Google news, did you notice the spellchecking and automatic search of correctly spelled query?
Many Google posts
So many are repeated
Taco is obsessed
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
jesus: $25.59
I like how God is worth $10.46 a day but
gay + sex ($2,239.56 + $3,836.79) is worth $6076.35 a day.
I wonder what "John Lennon" is worth, he may be right about being bigger than Jesus.. heh Ah, stratification is fun!
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.
From Google...
... )
... )
Hello. I am the automated performance monitor for Google AdWords Select. My job is to keep average clickthrough rates at a high level, so that users can consistently count on AdWords ads to help them find products and services.
The last 1,000 ad impressions I served to your campaign(s) received fewer than five clicks. When I see results like this, I significantly reduce the rate at which I show the ads so you can make changes to improve performance.
(
Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Automated Performance Monitor
From Slashdot...
Hello. I am the automated performance monitor for Slashdot. My job is to keep average moderation rates at a high level, so that users can consistently count on Slashdot to help them stay informed on "Stuff that matters."
The last 20 posts you made received a score of zero or lower, and by the way I noticed most of those said something to the effect of "FP" or "Furst PoZt". When I see results like this, I significantly reduce the rate at which I show your comments so you can make changes to improve the meaningfulness of your posts.
(
Sincerely,
The Slashdot Automated Performance Monitor
I Heart Sorting Networks
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
Free love from Google costs $8,833.95. Damn, that's a hell of a lot of free love.
... 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.
http://www.iterature.com/sorry.php
One of the reasons his ad campaign faltered is that his so-called poetry sucked. Now I really liked the idea of what he was doing, but he should have come up with better silly ads. Perhaps some haiku related to the word he was buying would work well.
Google charges $3,836.79 per day for sex. Will somebody tell me what they charge for a blowjob?
So ... If I choose expensive words that show up a lot on search results, but word my ad in such a way as to keep people from clicking directly on my site, but rather to send a message to them (such as a political statement), thus keeping my click-thru's low...
Then I get more impressions than I would have if I'd tried to have a higher click-thru, and therefore, my message gets across to more people for less cost.
Interesting. And, I can see why google wouldn't want you to do it (it would reduce the profits from the system).
-- If it ain't broke - overclock it more.
The thing I like about those poems is their subversiveness. How often have you just ignored advertising around you and then suddenly, one anti-advertisement catches your eye? When we surf or even search, we are skimming and go through a lot of things using our peripheral visions.
I once wrote a satirical piece that individuals would need to buy words before they could have the right to use them. So common words like pronouns and sex and friend and give would be too expensive for most people to afford, while words in other minor languages would be considerably cheaper.
Having an auction for words would be interesting and probably add variety to self-expression. Perhaps it is a far-fetched idea, but with Hollywood and content providers placing copyright lassos over so many things, will it be only a matter of time before corporations own the rights to certain words? Also, wouldn't it result in vast new vocabularies being created with every new day? I'm sick of using the word "sex." Why not use the word "glorb" instead?
By the way, if you want an absurdist meditation on words, buying, selling, etc, read The Phantom Tollbooth" by Norton Juster .
Robert Nagle
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
You could pull all sorts of little pranks like this, and at only a few cents for a few thousand views... So many opportunities :)
:) I just hope that pranks like this won't drive companies away from self service plans though...
One part I found amusing was that the first letter implied that they thought she was trying to sell something and maybe didn't know that her ads were confusing
I know this is off-topic, but the page linked to here where I found this choice morsel from google's adwords policies:
Links: Ad links to your website must allow people to return from your site to the results page by clicking on the browser's BACK button. These links must open in the same browser window as the ad. Links to pages that spawn pop-up windows are not allowed.
I can't help but be impressed. And they don't go around blurting out how they protect user interests either.
As if that wasn't enough, I did a search today for hhgtg.txt. Try it yourself and see if you aren't impressed.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
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.
Keyword____Clicks/Day____$/Click_______Cost/Day
freedom_________5.1______$0.37____________$1.88
free_________5700.0_______$1.33________$7,569.23
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
Okay, I asked if he could see how stuff like "vi/emacs/joe/word/koffice" or "gnome/kde/fvwm" or "linux/windows/bsd" would rate. Let's end all those flamewars once and for all with a pretty accurate non-scientific popularity contest.
:-)
Help me hope he'll put it on the page.
As some uninformed person once said,
"I may not know art, but I know what I like."
And personally, I don't like the first "poem" listed.
The first one says:
Words aren't free anymore
bicornuate-bicervical uterus
one-eyed hemi-vagina
www.unbehagen.com
This is supposed to be a poem? Come on, it's childish gibberish at best, and at worst it is a verbal attack on women. And since it is is response to the keyword "symtom", what relevence is it?
The second one says:
Follow your dreams
Did I just urinate ?
Directly into the wind
www.unbehagen.com
Again, childish drivel, in response to the keyword "dream".
the third one actually is redeeming:
mary !!!
I love you
come back
john
While not great literature, very emotive. In response to "mary", by the way.
And the last:
don't ever do that again
aaargh !
are you mad ?
ooops !!!
This one is in response to the keyword "money". so while it isn't as tasteless as the first two, what relevence does it have?
While I do support artistic expression, even the ones I find offensive or dimwitted, I also support the right of companies to limit their services as they see fit. If Google decides that these "poems" are offensive to their normal audience, they have the right to stop them. At least suspend them pending further review, and possibly see where the artist is going with it.
If these "poems" (I can't even legitimately call them poems, so yes the quotes are needed.) contained racist comments, they would be pulled in the same way. Since a large number of people may find at least the first two offensive, Google can pull them if they like, or if their legal advisors deem it appropriate.
I haven't read the whole page, just the top part, so I don't know where the porn ties into it, but this doesn't seem as big a deal as the submitter makes it out to be. If I searched for "dream" and got a link about peeing into the wind, I wouldn't be to impressed with the service.
Creative poet,
writes poor quality poems.
Google dissaproves.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
The main rules of this new world are not ethic rules. As you can read in the emails I received, my happening has been censored by Google not for moral reasons but for economic ones.
Google provides their adword service so that related topics can be displayed next to real live search results. Making sure the ads returned are related to the search performed makes sense for google, its users, and its adword advertisers.
This guy wants to force unrelated poetry into your view instead. As a result, no one was clicking on his adword because it wasn't related to their search, and google's automatic ranking system lowered his ads due to the very low click-through rate. The guy could keep his ads on google, they just would very rarely be displayed due to their not being related to the searches.
A self-correcting system that makes sense.
Google rules.
I don't agree with the reasons why I was censored. I believe that the censorship rules of Google are not in accordance with the power and the importance of the tool they have created.
But it's NOT censorship! (Even ignoring for a moment that 'censorship' is really only when THE GOVERNMENT prevents you from saying something, not a PRIVATE COMPANY!)
Such a tool should be used more freely and should be self-regulated.
How the fuck could google be "self-regulated," since mySELF doesn't have control over google?
They are a private company, not your personal tool for serving poetry.
"And like that
Think I'm joking? His own words describe it:
Well, tough for you. The site is a tool for searching, not for your grandstanding at their expense.
Which just goes to show the problems with the whole "open software" movement. People actually care about what is gratis not vrij.
I.e. They do not care about the freedom of things, just the prive of things. :-(
If not, perhaps you should check out the requirements again. Also, check out his other poetry site. The error message is actually quite cool.
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
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.
What if Microsoft bought Google? Or, a scarier thought: What if Google became the next Evil Empire?
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
I never saw her Google Ads;
I never hope to see Any;
But I can Tell you, Anyhow,
Her poetry's not worth a penny.
this post costs $1.85 per click. These are the most popular words, apparently.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
From the adwords page:
Relevancy: To ensure user interest and advertising success, all of your keywords must be relevant to your site or products. Furthermore, if you advertise a product or offer, you must link directly to the page on your site with that product or offer.
I noticed this new 'pay for click' advertising format on Google during the whole Xenu.net thing and decided to give it a try. I figured it would maximize my exposure while keeping my costs low. It was basically nonesense ads to my personal website targeted to words like 'stupid, lazy, engineer, engineering, waterloo' and the like. No one would click I figured, and I'd get a vew thousand views before I got my campain canned.
That's exactly what happened. My click-thru rate was too low and my ads stopped displaying. Never noticed that CTR clause when I was signing up, I figured I'd have a longer free ride. I still think it was a fun way to spend $5, (well, $5.70 with the price of all those clicks I got) and there's no one I'd rather give it to than Google.
It's a shame about the CTR limit, it would be nice to have accessable, effective advertising like this. The cost of 'important' words is deterrent enough for joyriders like me.
DataSquid.net, a little about me.
Try searching on hentai instead.
:)
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
"Her poems aren't worth a penny" scans a little better (but that second line stumbles a bit).
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
This could get entertaining:
/. (the gods are right, must be Google time for the Taco); but, it might be entertaining to build a cost-calculating dictionary (rolling queries and freshness to stay below the access limit) that would show the cost of any given word in the lexicon.
If google were to add an interface to the cost-querying logic to the new Google APIs, not only would it likely end up on
Useless, most likely, but definitely entertaining. Plus *grins* then from the usage statistics, you see the meta-data answering the following question: What words do people wonder about the value of
Clicks / Day: 210.0
Average Cost-Per-Click: $0.06
Cost / Day: $11.31
Average Position: 1.3
Try it yourself (click on "no obligation to buy").
It's used by that annoying redirect to /dev/null that he created.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
Yes. That's the point. It is market-driven
censorship. The fact that it is done automatically
just makes it all the more economically pure:
It is the decision of a purely rational agent,
which is otherwise a fiction of the mind of the
economist.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Back in the days of Q-Link, when screen names were only 10 characters and there was no automatic recycling after six months, Q-Link would auction off a handful of used screen names to the highest bidder. We're only talking in the tens of dollars, but it was always interesting to see what screen names people were willing to PAY to get.
Nope.
When you click on the ad someone pays $0.05 or so.
The $10,000 and $3,000 figures are for EVERYONE they expect will click that ad in one day.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
The price of words : towards a generalized semantic capitalism
Man, I want 0.25 of an ounce of what this guy's been smoking.
Still, I suppose it takes all types. I'm a mathematician, and while I think this guy's language is full of BS, anyone who isn't in mathematics reading one of my papers would probably feel the same about my writing.
Over at Kuro5hin, the site is pretty much paid for by user placed ads.
The difference between user text ads and corporate ads is amazing. There is a lot of fun in the top-left corner of the screen, where the ads sit. You can also comment on most ads (there is an option to prohibit commenting, but it is rarely used), as if they were stories.
We Kuro5hin-ers are quite happy with our ad system.
How the hell were any of those snippets considered "poetry"?! I'll let haiku go because it has a highly restricted form, but it ain't a poem if it doesn't rhyme...you're just not trying at that point. I mean, heck most poetry is just BS anyway...if you're not going to even try to make it rhyme, I'll just read the nutritional info on my cereal box.
Modern art is bull.
"Artists", formerly called
"Strange mental patients". =)
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
"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."
:p).
Using click-throughs as a metric has been debunked over and over and over and over. It's not about having people click links, it's about getting a message across to your target audience. When I see a Pesi commercial on TV, I don't run out to buy more. But I might think, "yea -- Pepsi is good" (depending on the content -- I don't like Britney
Click throughs ignore people who see an ad and check into it later, people who feel better about consuming what the ad is promoting and will also consume more later, and much more.
Don't push clickthroughs as a metric. That dilutes your ad promotion power to first time and curious people. Those people aren't a solid return customer metric upon which to base any sort of business.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
So what does it mean that kuro5hin has no ad associated with it ;-)
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
I can't remember what I was looking up when I saw this ad, but it was something benign. Now, I am not shitting you, that's what came up on my screen. It went to this webpage, which I'm surprised is still up.
It made me wonder whether we're becoming a self-appointed nation of commandos, or whether that was someone with simply way too much time and money on his hands.
According to the stats midway through the article, Bruno (presumably Rennisance philosopher Giordano Bruno) is searched for on Google more often than either Einstein or Freud. Now, I'm a bit fond of Il Nolano myself, but I rather thought he was rather obscure to people who haven't read Aegypt or Finnegan's Wake.
You really want to know? I have an account:
Keyword Matches vi
16,300 impressions (these are per-day)
Estimated cost per day: US$244.50
Keyword Matches emacs
17,200 impressions
Estimated cost per day: US$258.00
Keyword Matches joe
50,400 impressions
Estimated cost per day: US$756.00
Keyword Matches word
94,300 impressions
Estimated cost per day: US$1,414.50
Keyword Matches koffice
200 impressions
Estimated cost per day: US$3.00
Keyword Matches gnome
15,700 impressions
Estimated cost per day: US$235.50
Keyword Matches kde
15,200 impressions
Estimated cost per day: US$228.00
Keyword Matches fvwm
0 impressions
Estimated cost per day: US$0.00 0 impressions
Keyword Matches linux
523,200 impressions
Estimated cost per day: US$7,848.00
Keyword Matches windows
690,300 impressions
Estimated cost per day: US$10,354.50
Keyword Matches bsd
6,900 impressions
Estimated cost per day: US$103.50
--------------------
So, in summary, BSD really is dying, emacs just barely beats vi, KDE and gnome are neck and neck, and no one uses fvwm. Oh, and if you ask someone what koffice is, they will look at you funny.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
This is censorship of the worst kind. The TV companies have a government-enforced monopoly over the public airwaves, and are using it to suppress political speech.
Many (American) people believe that because the First Amendment only restricts Government censorship then there is no such thing as 'private censorship'. They're wrong. 'Censorship' by a private company remains censorship, it just isn't unconstitutional...
As various posters have pointed out, the word censor basically means something along the lines of: 'to examine books etc for the purpose of suppressing parts deemed objectionable on moral, political or other grounds'.
Thus, if in my ISP's chatroom, I criticise the company and its level of service, and that company deliberately deletes my posts, then I have been censored.
The fact that this is probably entirely lawful under my terms of service does not alter the fact that it is censorship.
The fact that this is not absolute (I can repost my comments elsewhere) does not alter the fact that it is censorship. (Censorship is almost never absolute. Texts censored by the Soviet Union would still pop up, printed and distributed illegally.)
This has been a brief digression on the subject of private censorship. I make no comment on the google-adwords thing (because I can't access the freakin' website as it's been slashdotted (but not censored)).
Nick
For example, a poem can not rhyme but follow a set beat pattern. (Like a limerick that doesn't rhyme.) Other examples could be a common starting sound (starting each line with a sound as opposed to vice versa, sort of like allieration) or trying to envoke a sound via words (onomatopoeia).
In any case, a poem need not rhyme. The only thing poems usually have are set lines that don't necessarily match sentences.
Anyway, I'm not a poet or an English major or anything like that, so check out About.com's section on poetry writing for various styles of poetry, not all of which involve rhyming. (Although most styles do.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Crap. Hey, at least I can remember the Spanish lyrics Linda was going to try. Senor Plow no es macho, y solamente [I think, can't quite hear this word] un boracho. . .
Yep, mentioned them in my first post, but I didn't bother to link to the actual story about the ad rejection. TV stations will also, rarely, reject some political ads.
Interesting. Of course "gnome" is also a dictionary word and KDE is not (well, in Czech it is, I believe), so it might not be as neck to neck as this implies. I think I'm gonna buy fvwm keywords and see how long I can last with $5. ;-)
Yeah, I'm starting to warm to it. Is there any reasonable way to lose the split infinitive? (because I'm that sort of bear -- I always wince and mutter, "boldly to go!" at the beginning of Star Trek)
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander