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Markets in everything
Because keywords are sold through online auctions, prices often spike for those connected with big breaking-news stories. On the day of the Virginia Tech shootings, the cost per click of buying phrases such as "Virginia Tech," "Virginia Tech shooting," and "Virginia Tech massacre" jumped as high as $5. Over the following week, prices dropped to six or eight cents a click, according to Reprise Media, a search-marketing firm owned by Interpublic Group. A longer-lasting news term, such as "Iraq war," costs on average 39 cents a click, Reprise says.
Here is the full story, and thanks to Nick for the pointer.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 4, 2007 at 06:18 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
can monitoring for abnormal jumps in price-vloume data for certain keywords be a an imperfect subsitute for an idea futures market?
Posted by: sa at May 4, 2007 8:08:41 AM
A really clever person could use that to improve the accuracy of a news aggregation service like Google News -- indeed, I wonder if they do.
One of the big problems automated aggregators suffer from is the inability to determine that a cluster of related stories represents "breaking news" as quickly as a human would. If the algoritms are instead tuned to catch fast-rising clusters, a tendency to twitchily declare that a spurious cluster represents real news -- see, eg, the occasional appearance of some dull local-news story on the front page because two minor characters have names in common with people involved in bigger stories.
But with humans driving the per-click prices, it might well be that they would respond more quickly and consistently than the algorithms.
Of course, that also creates an advertising-editorial feedback loop of a sort generally regarded as the opposite of responsible journalism. But in this case it might be benign.
Posted by: Grant Gould at May 4, 2007 11:52:23 AM
