I've been working on a draft of a my "note" for the BU Journal of Science and Technology Law all weekend. In the course of my research for the note, which is about FTC regulation of paid listings on search engines, I've discovered some very expensive clicking going on on the internet.
Overture (originally called Goto.com) was the first search engine to offer paid listings to advertisers. Each advertiser has to be approved for a certain category of search term. Then they bid for placement at the top of the search results. For example, I could bid $.05 for "Andrew Sinclair" and this page would come up first in an Overture search. Then I would have to pay Overture $.05 every time someone clicked on it. This is kinda ridiculous of course, because you should be able to find this page anyway when you search for "Andrew Sinclair". That's what the page is about. Of course, there are more competitive search terms out there.
Now, Overture has been making deals with all the major search engines: AOL, Altavista, etc. When you do a search on those and see the "featured listings", those are the Overture listings. Overture pays these companies to host the listings, and keeps some of the profits from them.
The problem with this system is that it promotes pages by the advertisers value-per-lead rather than by relevance to the searcher. For example, if I type in "credit card" I'm going to get a lot of results that are people trying to get me to sign up for a credit card, not information about how a credit card works or the problems caused by credit card debt. A lead for a credit card might be worth a couple bucks while a lead for a credit counselor might be worth a couple cents. In short, the scale is tipped to the profitable industry, but based on lead value rather than overall profit. (A lead for a car might be worth a lot more than a lead for car products, even though car products might be more profitable in the long run. The car sales advertisement will rise to the top.)
Now for the revelation: Overture lets you see how much people are paying for a click on their listing. I've often tried to guess what the most expensive search term is. Is it travel? ($1.06) Is it credit cards? ($.90) What? Finally today I read an article that suggested that the most expensive clicks (and therefore probably the most valuable leads) are in the data recovery industry. I guess people looking for data recovery really end up spending a lot of money on data recovery services. This makes sense of course, because if you're looking for "data recovery" you've got a problem and you're willing to pay to fix it.
How much are people paying right now for you to click on their listings after searching for "data recovery"? $8.55 PER CLICK! Click away!