The Novel and Negative of Selling Keywords
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/crypto-scammers-google-ads-phishing-campaign-100044007.html
Advertising has come a long way from classic television commercial breaks separating our shows. Marketing on television focuses on how many people are watching to determine a cost and typically advertisers can only market to that program’s general audience. Since many different types of audiences will watch a show, advertisers can only attempt to market to broad demographics such as adults or children. Google’s innovation of allowing advertisers to show their website links when users search specific keywords allows for much more targeting in advertising. For example, a user who searches looking for water sports equipment, may be shown a link to a kayak store above the search results and if the user clicks on this link the advertiser would have to pay some cost. This directly relates to what we have been learning in class, as we analyzed how these advertisers can find a cost per click that clears the market and are then shown to users. Since each advertiser has their own value for these limited ad slots, we learned that we can set up this dilemma of who gets which ad slot up in a network graph. By finding a perfect matching that essentially gives the most valuable slot to the advertiser who gives the cost per click the highest value, we can predict which ad slot will go to which advertiser. These market clearing prices all work for each advertiser as they maximize total value for all parties involved.
The article I chose to examine, though, discloses a darker side to the capitalism present in these advertiser keyword markets. The piece explains how recently scammers have been utilizing Google targeted search ads to make people think that they are a genuine crypto wallet. They lure people into giving them their real crypto wallet login and then steal all the coins in that wallet with that password. In the last weekend, 500,000 dollars in crypto were stolen from wallets using this method, which shows how while this novel advertising strategy may be beneficial for marketers, it definitely can harm users. These scamming groups are currently bidding on these ad slots, which demonstrates some real negative ramifications that can occur from these markets, which only seek to maximize value for all involved, not consider the effects on consumers. I hope this article spurs more regulation in these advertising markets we have studied in class, so search engine users can be protected from deceit.