According to Search Engine Lowdown the cost per click auction model of on-line advertising can get a bit out of hand from time to time.
Narrowly-defined keywords can lead to short-term bidding wars. In March '04, eDiets.com and SouthBeachDiet.com managed to drive the cost-per-click of the phrase "weight loss diet" from $2.00 to over $75.00.
Wow. I knew that some specific markets have significantly higher than average CPC rates, that seems a bit nuts.
Posted by jzawodn at May 18, 2004 10:09 PM
Sorry to disappoint you, but we didn't get to discuss much about corporate blogging. As usual, we focused more on general blogging phenomenon than the corporate subset.
Still, I can share what I observed so far. What I observed is that:
The chance of two random employees of a large company communicating with each other is practically zero. Yes, people work closely up at the top of the pyramid, but not at the bottom where the pyramid gets much wider.
If you throw smoking habit and location into the equation, you get a much higher percentage. In comparison, blogging is just as addictive, not limited to time or space, and information exchange is not transient.
I haven't bothered to put all this together yet, but I thought it might be useful to you.
Heh, well I'm glad I am in the business. We haven't seen that kind of return on the AdSense ads, but they haven't been bad. I have heard the ads for computer certification have had a run up too.
Jeremy, $75.00 is not much on Overture. I know of at least 30 examples, where the top bidder is bidding $100.00, the second bidder is bidding $99.99, and then the third bidder is bidding around a buck or so.
The fun part comes in when somebody clicks on that #1, they pay 1 penny over the #2 bid. But in the case if somebody clicks on the #2 bid, they pay 1 penny over the #3 bid of $1.00.
Now that's a scam!
Donny
