Daily Archives: November 7, 2005

Fun and games with ads?

After talking about the biased coverage of the Strickland vs. Sony case, and Jack Thompson’s role in it, I noticed the ads that Google had put at the top of that post. Oddly enough, they were about class action law suits, and Vioxx lawsuits. This caused me to begin thinking of the ways you could play around with the content of a post to see what type of ads would appear on the page. Would that be a game? Or would it be play?

I know that there are lots of spam blogs out there that are just about getting Google rank and linking to other spam blogs. I also know that there are allegedly some people out there that have started blogs about asbestos and mesothelioma just because the payoff on ads relating to asbestos and mesothelioma are supposed to be incredibly high. So just by mentioning asbestos or mentioning mesothelioma am I trying to force the ads to display things related to that? Is it cheating to just talk about mesothelioma or asbestos just so those terms show up? I know Google probably has some filters to make sure that people don’t just “game” the system so that they get ads that pay the best, so is that Google playing the game as well?

What about asking my readers to click on the ads? I’ve heard of people making lots of money off the ads, but I’ve had those ads up there for a year and have only made a little over $35. Of course you only get paid when you earn over a hundred dollars. Of course if people were to start clicking on the ads more frequently, if because I were to make a pointless post about asbestos and mesothelioma, would that be cheating?

Of course, it could also be that I’m playing more than one game at a time. One with Google, and one with my readers? They could play their own game back, I suppose…