SocioEconomics of GoogleAds

October 1, 2004 2:48 PM

The Price of/for Attention

"While it's interesting (and soul-crushingly depressing) to discover bidding wars over keywords associated with human suffering, I'm focused on the idea that I can pull data about web users' interest in different subjects out of this data."

The fight to get attention on humanitarian crises, the dynamics of web browsing, and something like statistical game theory meet for a greased wrestling match in GoogleAds.
posted by freebird (6 comments total)

Very interesting. Great link.
posted by tiamat at 2:57 PM on October 1, 2004

Interesting stuff. His Global Attention Profiles project which tracks which countries are most frequently mentioned in selected news sources is worth checking out as well.
posted by euphorb at 3:29 PM on October 1, 2004

Wow, the GAP stuff is really cool, thanks! I was thinking he should also relate attention to GDP or population...and then I read more of the page.
posted by freebird at 3:35 PM on October 1, 2004

Wow. Really worth reading the latter half of his thesis, after all his explanation of how GoogleAds works.
posted by five fresh fish at 4:25 PM on October 1, 2004

Excellent find, freebird. Thanks.
posted by stonerose at 7:48 AM on October 2, 2004

Thanks, freebird. No one has ever described my research as a "greased wrestling match" before - I'm oddly gratified.

I'll be redoing the Global Attention page (http://h2odev.law.harvard.edu/ezuckerman) in the next couple of weeks to feature some of the other Internet Sociology stuff I've been doing. Thanks for linking.
posted by obruni at 9:06 AM on October 4, 2004