Slashdot Mirror
Blog Content Based Solely on High Paying Keywords
Doug Nelson writes "Michael Buffington chose to build a weblog using highly automated content aggregation tools around a single keyword, asbestos, because of the high click through rate associated with the ad.
'The subject matter, while weighty and all that, is of little importance to me. It's not that I don't have opinions on asbestos and asbestos reform, because I do. The whole point of the site is to experiment with an idea. I built a tool that helps me aggregate topical news with the help of Google's Alert system. So far it works wonderfully. But there's a second motive as well. Right now asbestos reform and asbestos related litigation is on fire. Lawyers are paying anywhere from $15-100 per click through on Google ads. The second part of this big experiment is to see if I can capture some of that click through revenue while still providing a somewhat valid service to people who might arrive by search results.'"
I think the link to the blog should NOT have been included. It's just driving even more traffic there now that wouldn't be generated otherwise.
I sure hope "doug nelson" gets a cut of the clickthroughs for posting the story here and getting "michael bluffington" the traffic.
Providing a 'somewhat valid service'?? Come on, the only real reason he's doing this is the money, and now it's on Slashdot as well! More money!
Once again, another fine example of how anywhere there is a profit to be made, someone will try and do it.
Let's hope this doesn't become so commonplace that the entire medium of blogs becomes suspect in the same way modern television news has.
~Rebecca
Roland Piquepaille does that now with Slashdot. Aggregate content and redigest it and offer it up for viewers with advertisement banners readily available.
Not saying there's anything wrong with it, it's just a little antithetical, if you know what I mean.
And how is this news exactly? There are many sites out there that based solely on a particular topic. All sites selling commercial products make their sites according to the keywords related to their products. Porn sites do the same too.
If I can make money from the lawyers instead of them making money off of me, how is that a bad thing?
I'm just disappointed that I didn't think of it first. Good job Michael.
And they said zombies weren't real!
When I just now typed "Asbestos" into Google and clicked on the eight ads that came up on the right, I just cost a bunch of lawyers over $100? W007! I think I'll try it again from work.
Nah. It's probably Roland Piquepaille. ;-)
"You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older."
Why is this posted on Slashdot? This article doesn't fit the Slashdot slogan, "News for nerds .. _stuff that matters_" It's no wonder that this story is simply going to increase the revenue he's looking for, for providing his "somewhat valid service."
What a waste of space.
Come on, can we go back to the "news that matters"?
This site is becoming a long and boring infomercial.
I don't have a sig.
I wonderasbestos what Googleasbestos would think ofasbestos this.asbestos Against any sortasbestos of terms ofasbestos service?
"Asbestos" is too generic. "Asbestosis" would be better, but the word the ambulance chasers pay a lot for is "mesothelioma", on the assumption the person typing that word already has that problem or is close to someone who has it. I would have thought "pneumoconiosis" would be high on the list, but no-one seems to be tagging it.
At $15-100 per click-through, /. might do quite a bit of damage to some lawyer's wallet. I assume the ads have limits on total numbers, but I'd bet that most of the click-happy people that follow these links won't be actual clients for asbestos litigation.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I think you have to be careful plugging blogs on slashdot, in case somebody starts a googlebomb with the words Money-Grabbing Pseudo-scammer or something like that. That would be unfortunate.
This is against their terms of service
"No Google ad may be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant"
This type of thing makes me a little sick. If you follow the money trail, you'll see that this type of thing only serves to hurt people and society and enrich lawyers at the same time.
1. Companies buy insurance from insurance companies
2. Regular people buy products from company
3. Some people get hurt by company's product
4. Lawyers sue company on behalf of hurt plaintiffs
5. Lawyers win case for plaintiff, Company's insurance company pays $10 gazillion
6. Lawyers for plaintiff take 60% of $10 gazillion
7. Company's insurance rates are raised
8. Company raises prices
9. Regular people pay higher prices to company
So, who pays for such litigation and $100-per-click AdWords? You do.
I'm a big tall mofo.
How much did you pay slashdot for your link?
Google does not usually like sites built specifically for adsense (as well as being against the adsense terms & conditions ). I wonder how long his adsense account will last before google terminates it.
Wanting frontpage coverage on slashdot is great for revenue, but admitting to building the site for adsense, well thats priceless.
the only real reason he's doing this is the money
These two things aren't incompatible.
The only reason my super-market provides groceries is to make money, and the result is a valid service.
The only reason the movie theater down the road plays movies is to make money, and the result is a valid service.
Just because this blogger is motivated by money does not mean that the service he provides is a scam. He's aggregating information, and will likely eventually - after he's been covering the topic long enough - provide knowledgeable commentary on it. I wouldn't be suprised if, in a few years, he's doing original research on the issue, iterviewing people, and digging up articles in libraries.
What he's doing is indistinguishable from someone starting up a new magazine because they see a demographic that would read it and an advertising base that would purchase ads (see, for example Make). The end result is that all three parties are better off: the readers get something that they choose to read, the advertisers get eyeballs, and the guy who puts it all together gets a slice.
What you're seeing is actually history in the making - the decoupling of demand-driven journalism from media companies.
Do we really have to advertise search engine spammers on the Slashdot front page? People like this who only want to exploit the search engine rating systems for their own advantage are the reason of high prices and low effectiveness of on-line advertising. I hope Google will ban this scam website from its results altogether and not waste a single penny on them. Do we really want an important searches to return thousands upon thousands of irrelevant results that are nothing more than a lists of links to other lists of links, ad nauseam? It's already nearly impossible to search for pornography, but at least no one searching for pornography needs help. People who search for asbestos are usually not the ones who want to buy some asbestos, but actually those who suffer from asbestosis. What next? Hijacking the search results of people who look for cancer treatment just to immorally squeeze few bucks from them and force greedy lawyer advertisements upon their throats? This is just disgusting. I am really disappointed that such a link has been posted on Slashdot.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
After looking up antithetical, I'm afraid I must say I don't know what you mean.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
was talk about what he was doing.
The first rule of adsense is you don't talk about adsense.
If you're making money, keep it to yourself or the next day, a million people will be doing the same thing.
I have noticed this myself.... most blogs are turning in to spamblogs.
Engadget (where slashdot gets a lot of its stories) is a great site, but the ad content has risen significantly over the past few months.
Blogs were originally meant to be diaries and driven by either pseudo journalism for fun or just a way to rant about topics the owner loved to talk about. In some cases, they were meant to be ways to keep in contact with friends.
The mainstream, embracing blogs, has prompted many of the "original bloggers" to become greedy and place ads all over their sites - whoring different products.
I have a blog for my website that is used mainly as a comments forum. It has been very useful for me to get into keyword searches.
I refuse to whore ads from companies to take advantage of some system where I don't merit the money. I advertise on the main site with advertisers that I have contacted and told them the benefit of our synergy.
Another reason I don't use Ads by Google or a shared banner type ad placement is because Google and "Click Ad Companies" don't police spyware and ad ware banners and websites. I don't want anyone reading my website or visiting my commerce site to be associated with any of that.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Then lets say you aren't sure what the blown-in insulation is...it looks like cellulose, but you know the exterior of the house is done in asbestos (which isn't a problem, since its hard and painted) so you're concerned that the blown-in insulation in your walls might be asbestos.
So, you want to go do a search at google. You find a few government sites that tell you to contact expensive labs, but...you just want a picture. You just want to know what the best course of action is.
To find that, you have to sift through a bazillion crap-pollution sites like the one this guy has made. Where the HELL is the "valid service" in that? I don't have cancer. I've been exposed for minutes, not years. I don't want to be part of a class-action lawsuit (which are, thankfully, going to be smaller now). I just want to know what the best course of action is.
What Buffington is doing is hardly new. Bloggers have been chasing high-paying keywords from the day AdSense was announced. The trend accelerated last year when the Wall Street Journal did a front-page feature about how much lawyers were paying for asbestos-related keywords. Tons of webmaster-related web sites offer tips on similar AdSense strategies, and there's even companies offering to sell databases of high-paying keywords for $199. This guy is actually way late in adopting a widely-used strategy. But by discussing his motivations so directly, he got linked on Boing-Boing and Slashdot. He's an accidental marketing genius. Go figure.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
I am a sys admin and programmer. In my free time tend to write a lot of financial analysis code for equity movement forecasting. So I started a blog about it.
Inadvertently I stumbled onto the fact that the stock market and associated terms is a relatively high popularity AdWord in Google, so the rare clicks that I got were fairly high value.
Since I am a sys admin and have to deal with blocking spam both on a personal level and also for our office network, I was seeing that there was a clear trend in spam - I think we could all see it - it was going up and up and up.
So I started a blog in order to discuss spam and ways to stop it, since apparently many people weren't familiar with what was available (especially since so many people actually buy from spam).
But I have to admit, that was only part of the motive - part of it was the curiosity on AdWord revenue from something that was going to be growing so much in popularity (probably the wrong word there).
I have seen some ad clicks on the spam blog go for as much as $10, and on the stock market blog they tend to top out at about $1.50.
Unfortunately, due to starting up my own company on the side, and increasing pressures at work - combined with the fact that there is only so much you can say about a subject, I stopped posting as much to the spam blog.
I also haven't posted to the financial blog in far too long as well, but more because I accidentally (retarded I know) deleted my stock database one bleary-eyed morning and I have yet to rebuild it largely out of laziness. (I had incentive for awhile since I was trading for a friend and making him money, but then stopped doing that so that I could lock in the gains and now have less incentive to care until I can trade more with my own funds)
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Thank God people have an incentive to produce content that is important to other people. Otherwise the internet would degenerate to people posting pictures of their cats doing cute things.
Having grown up with someone who now runs a grocery store, I can tell you that the only reason his grocery store runs is not to make money. His grocery store runs becuase
a) He enjoys providing his community with a safe gathering place that meets a common need across all age, race, and gender groups
and
b) He needs to make a living and in exchange for his service, his community provides him with one
I can hear all of the Smithians screaming, "but (b) is just another way of saying 'to make money,' they're the same statement!"
No. The goal of "making money" is significantly different from the goal of "making a living," even if the two employ some of the same means and some of the same ends.
The former is greedy and unindividuated, it is the process of finding an exploitable point in the market economy and sucking wealth out of it for personal use, even if that wealth could help someone else or even if the removal of that wealth isn't good for other people-- see also lottery tickets, etc.
The latter is a matter of personal survival and good intentions-- it is asking a different question: "I have to live, so what can I do that will justify my community's support of me and help me to support them as well?"
I have a lot of respect for living-earners, but not a lot of respect for money-makers. I also don't think that Smith is god; there are centuries' worth of economists (including some very big names) that have basically diluted smith to the point of being to the operation of modern economics what Edison is to the operation of modern technology.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Right now asbestos reform and asbestos related litigation is on fire.
Wait, I thought the whole point of asbestos was for it not to be on fire.
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
Having worked in this space for the past few years, I can provide some insight. There are two parts to this issue, the person paying for clicks and the person generating the clicks.
The asbestos mesothelioma bandwagon started a few years ago when the government set aside a multi billion dollar trust fund for victims. In order to dip into the trust fund, a lawyer needs a valid victim of asbestos. The name of the common disease for those that suffer from asbestos exposure is mesothelioma. The average payout is $1M and the attorney commissions are 40%. This explains why attorneys are willing to pay high prices for clicks. Clicks go for as much as $100 on Overture however in practice you never see those high CPC rates. A year ago, $30 clicks were normal; today it's more like $0.25-$5. Even at $100/click, attorneys are taking in huge profits. Paying $10k for a case or 100 clicks at $100/click can be a good investment if you can generate $400k in attorney fees for that case.
Setting up a website to capture these pricey clicks is simple but doing it well can be nearly impossible. The asbestos/meso space is as competitive as it gets. Setting up a blog, creating doorway pages, links and content will only generate a little traffic. Doing well in meso requires aggressive SEO, solid optimization, links and content. Having a lot of traffic makes it easier to monetize. With enough traffic you can lease your site to law firms. AdSense is generally very inefficient so it makes sense to cut out the middle man. Kicking publishers out of Adsense will not stop these sites.
It is an interesting space. The huge settlements that lawyers have been able to generate has fueled a frenzy of SEO activity in the past year. The same activity is seen on TV and print media in Vioxx ads. The most surprising thing here is people are acknowledging online advertising and its ability to sell almost anything.