Friday, August 22, 2003

Making Money by News-related AdWords

Carl Bialik (Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal) reports on how Small Web Advertisers Mobilize as News Breaks.

The idea is simple and effective. It first came to my mind when the leader of the German party FDP jumped out of an airplane and didn’t open his parachute – he was in deep trouble, politically, so everything hinted at suicide.

As soon as I saw the headline I went to Google, entered his name (“Jürgen Möllemann”), and scrolled through the results. Of course, there wasn’t much relevant information up yet, since the news was so fresh. (In fact, his own homepage still carried banners for parachute hobby clubs!)
So I thought about putting up a page with current news link, some information, and also, an Amazon Associates book link to his autobiography. But then, I thought it might not be ethical to make money from his death, so I dropped the idea.

Maybe when the next news pops up, I will think about it – is it ethical to create an information page? Are there books on the subject? How many people with the same idea are thinking about running ads at the same moment? Of course, the conversion rate needs to be really good. For every AdWords click to my page, I would pay to Google. For every book bought via my page, I would get money from Amazon. The more people who see my ad click and decide to click on it, the less I have to pay per click; and the more people coming to my page buying a book, the more I get back.

Making Money by News-rela ... by Philipp Lenssen

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