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Diamond Cross · 04-18-2007, 04:16 PM

Media Outlets Buying Google Keywords

By Ken Wheaton

Published: April 17, 2007

I guess it all boils down to business. A reader e-mailed to alert us to the results of a Google search for Virginia Shooting. Seems The New York Times and Inside Edition, among others, have purchased the key words.

Perhaps not quite as bad as Dateline's FaceBook group seeking out friends of the shooter (about halfway down in this post), but still ...

From a purely financial perspective, this makes sense I guess. After all, even here at Ad Age we're always hectoring marketers to be smarter about key-word marketing -- whether it be Taco Bell trying to put a positive spin on those rats or small pet-food companies getting the word out about safe alternatives.

I've yet to figure out if the media companies specifically bought these words or if it was the result of one of those fancy Google algorithms combined with a contextual ad program. (We've got calls out and will use the wonderful powers of the interwebs to update.)

Either way, it strikes me as incredibly tacky.

Advertising Age

Okay, I don't understand this at all. It is tacky as hell though.

motivez · 04-21-2007, 05:21 PM

I don't know why it's tacky really, they pay for the ability to advertise on places like google.. and they are news services providing a service to people who want information about those subjects.

It does make sense from a business standpoint to ensure people are able to find your business when searching for things you provide.. whether that's the news of the day or news topics in general.

Having purchased ad space for this site from google, you have to specifically purchase the key words if you want your page to show up on searches for them (or the words related to them), so I mean, I don't see a problem.

Is it tacky to advertise our site when people look up terrorism or gun control or abortion? I dunno, we offer people a place to discuss those issues and so while we certainly do exploit the "hot" nature of those topics in trying to get people here, I don't see anything "wrong" with it.