From: Duff,Robert Joel (rjduff@uakron.edu)
Date: Sun Sep 22 2002 - 15:29:59 EDT
Hi,
There have been many discussion on this group about the effectiveness
of ASA to distribute material. We have discussed the relative
effectiveness of various YEC groups to influence vast numbers of
Christians. I've recently run accross an interesting aspect of the
apologetic tactic that Answers in Genesis has been engaged in for
some time. Maybe this is old news to some about how the web works
but I suspect it will surprise some.
In setting up advertising for my own business web site I stumbled
accross some data on AiG. They are using Pay-per-click advertising
to draw people to their web site. Dr. Dino and a couple other people
are doing the same thing on a smaller scale but AiG has registered a
large number of search words and is paying to have their site come up
first in searches on many of the most popular search vehicles.
For example: type in Carbon 14 on Lycos.com and you will get one
sponsored link which goes to AiG. They are paying 5 cents each time
someone clicks on that link. The list goes on and on. If you want
to see how much people are paying for the sponsered links (many times
people don't even realize the tope 1-5 returns are payed for links!)
go to this site and put in a search word.
http://www.overture.com/d/USm/home/index.jhtml
Even terms like "evolution" yield a #2 hit for answers in genesis
that they are paying for.
Given the number of search terms I've found that AiG "owns" I would
imagine they are spending some real money to push people that might
be wondering about these topics to their page. I had always wondered
how they could attract such a huge number of unique visitors to their
pages.
BTW, if you know of a great article on the web related to an uncommon
search term you could easily own top billing for that search term for
under 10 cents a click and it only takes minutes to set up an account
to drive people toward any link you want them to go to.
Regards,
Joel Duff
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