Are There News Publication Implications To Paid Search?

from the questions,-questions... dept

On Friday, the news about the problems with Merck's Vioxx drug broke. Saturday morning I heard an ad from a lawfirm looking to round up Vioxx-taking clients for a case against Merck. Lawyers, these days, know how to spring into action for class-action lawsuits. Making a radio commercial takes a little bit of time, however. Buying up paid search ads can be done in just a few minutes. CBS Marketwatch notes that the fee to buy the keyword "Vioxx" shot up very quickly over the weekend as law firms sought to find clients for any such case. Still, going one step beyond that, E-Media Tidbits is wondering if this, combined with the rise in contextual advertising, will eventually influence story selection for news sites. That post links to a couple of news stories about the drug recall news that show lawyer ads with the story. While the fear is that this will somehow influence story selection, that seems a little overblown. While there clearly are sites out there designed specifically to try to make money off of contextual advertising by picking topics associated with high cost-per-clicks those are clearly there just to pick up the clicks. For a regular news publisher, it's unlikely that any single topic is going to generate enough clicks and revenue to have a publisher put pressure on a reporter or writer to cover that specific story.

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