
Top 50,000 paying Adsense keywords (purchased from a shady looking website) - iamelgringo
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B2QExXr67OcTZjNlNDYwMTktNmE4YS00MTYyLTg1NGUtMmJhMzg0YmIzZjBi&hl=en
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iamelgringo
So, last March, after two startup ideas bombed, I was doing some research on
where online advertising revenue was being spent. I figured that if I was
going to even partially monetize with ad revenue, it made sense to figure out
what topics and niches were paying.

As part of that research, I ended up purchasing a list of the top 50k paying
keywords off a shady looking website. The site only took PayPal, and they were
only charging 50 bucks, so I figured it was worth it, and I wasn't risking too
much aside from exposing my PayPal account, so I bought it.

I was pretty skeptical of the data at first, but I randomly spot checked
around 50 search terms, with my Adsense account, and they seemed to correlate
pretty closely.

I then wrote a script to cross reference how much people were paying for each
set of keywords with how many results were returned for those keywords. That
gave me a ratio of High cost keywords::number of results, which was
enlightening.

Mind you, this data is suspect. Google doesn't charge a fixed rate for their
advertising rates, from what I understand, each time an ad is served, the
price essentially depends on an auction and the price varies accordingly.
Also, I bought this data off a shady looking website during a really low point
in one of the worst economies in decades. _Caveat Emptor_

That being said, I thought you might find it interesting.

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nixy
Do you have the rights to re-distribute this data?

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btmorex
Facts can't be copyrighted. There's no problem with redistributing the data.

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shabda
Facts and ideas can't be copyrighted, but their expression and structure can.

<http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html>

This is definitely a copyright violation, and I am shocked and enraged that
this was voted so highly on HN and not flagged.

[Edits]

1\. The standard "Recipes and collection of recipes" argument. This is a
collection of recipes.

2\. I am not shocked that there is a copyright violation. I am shocked that
such an egregious violation has been voted so highly on HN. We are all digital
workers on HN, and such disregard for digital work is (still) shocking.

~~~
davidu
Enraged? Your reaction doesn't fit the crime, as is so often the case with
copyright.

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iamelgringo
I throw myself on the court of community opinion. Please feel free to flag
this post if you think it's unethical or wrong. And, the mods and/or the HN
algorithm will mark it dead.

I'm really not trying to be a ass. I thought it was interesting, and the
recent post where the author was driving traffic to his blog by posting the
top 50 keywords reminded me of it. I did this project over a year ago in March
of '09. I don't think I'm giving away any trade secrets at this point.

I thought I'd share the whole list I'm sure he bought in the spirit of
openness. But, as I said, it's really no skin off my nose. Feel free to flag
this if you think it's inappropriate. I'm really not up for getting flamed or
arguing.

~~~
keefe
Well, you certainly convinced me to download with this comment :]

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patio11
These surface on the SEO underground every once in a while. I personally don't
think the data is that valuable except for getting less-than-savvy folks to
pay scads of money for a CSV file (present company excepted, most folks who
buy this are going to be the DigitalPoint "How do I make $1 a day with
AdSense!?" crowd that buy most Make Money Online products).

That said, the existence of lists like this always makes me shoot a baleful
glare in the general direction of Google's "transparency." They are very happy
to give away all _the rest of_ the world's information, but anything Big G
thinks is commercially sensitive _for Google_ is guarded like Fort Knox. (Did
you know AdSense users can't even tell you the CPC rates they get without
violating the TOS?)

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iamelgringo
You've hit the nail on the head. I didn't really want to bring up that issue,
but I'm glad that you did. Google also makes it against their TOS to
automatically crawl their search content:
[http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answe...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66357)

IMHO, that's patently absurd considering the business they are in.

re: transparency:

In what other business would it be remotely okay to not talk about the
purchase price, or the sales price of an item? That's just patently silly.

And, the transparency really only gets worse the closer you get to Google
headquarters. I can't tell you how many Googlers that I end up having brief
chat's with, that can't talk about what they do or what they are working on in
more than very vague terms. It's creepy.

re: _I personally don't think the data is that valuable except for getting
less-than-savvy folks to pay scads of money for a CSV file_

You're absolutely correct. The list is really not that valuable, but you see
where people take that information and run with it putting out hundreds of
cheap SEO sites that target mesothelioma. Where I did find value in it, was in
categorizing sectors where people pay a log of money for customer lead
generation. That's Legal and Financial.

So, I mulled that idea around for a while, and I decided I would try and focus
my startup, <http://Newsley.com> on the Ecnomic and Financial News space. One
quarter of all online ad spend is devoted to Financial services marketing.
It's a 3.5 Billion a year industry. And, I dont' really see that many
financial services ad that much, so they must be paying a lot.

I've been taking Newsley in a different direction now that I'm part way into
the business, I'm talking to a lot of people that manage large sums of money
for a living, and I'm picking their brains about their news finding and
filtering problems. It's been really valuable. My current business has really
nothing to with the original list, but it at least pointed me in a certain
direction, and I'm quite happy I did it.

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DanielBMarkham
I'm flagging you. I was one of the people paying 50 bucks for it, and this
just starts some kind of stupid DRM battle. The guys did the work to
accumulate the data, they're not asking for your firstborn. Giving it away is
just screwing over somebody else's business model simply because you can.

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harshpotatoes
So somebody spent the time to figure this data out, is selling it, and you're
now giving away their product for free? Is there more to this story?

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laxk
It's forbidden right now, is there any other url?

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iamelgringo
[http://ran.dom.crap.s3.amazonaws.com/Top%20Google%20Key%20Wo...](http://ran.dom.crap.s3.amazonaws.com/Top%20Google%20Key%20Words.csv)

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agbell
Likely this data comes from google's keyword tool, which has a paid API.

semisland.com/semrush.com has alot of good data of this type. Also, they
scrape the ads and organic rankings for a ton of keywords.

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steveplace
For those that don't want to download, I'll give you a major theme in this
after a quick perusal.

1\. It's very hard to bid on trademarked names. For example "Disney" may take
issue with your "Orlando on $20 a day" clickbank ebook ad.

2\. It's a little less competitive if you use misspells. So bidding on
"Dinsey" could provide higher CR. This is a fairly well-known theme.

Do note, my example was not included in the file.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
_Caveat_ : a trademark protects the owner from you attempting to confuse the
public into buying your product because they think it comes from the trademark
owner. Using typos is attempting confusion. Thus simply relabelling things as
"dinsey" doesn't avoid a potential trademark suit.

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wdewind
Has anyone actually looked at these? Most of them have typos (ie: ameratrade
instead of ameritrade).

I don't think this is the top 50k search terms, maybe it's the top 50k when
there was a google suggest or something?

I refuse to believe "visaa" ranks higher than "visa" and that "ameratrade" was
#1.

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drm237
It's not a list of search volume, it's a list of the top keywords ordered by
cpc price in adsense. Some (most?) likely have little to no search volume at
all.

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wdewind
Ah my mistake, thanks. Makes sense then that one offs are the most valuable
(lowest competition, latches on to a real one)

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bd
Also it could be that people who misspell these terms are easier to monetize.

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jaybol
Now that would be a fascinating study indeed! The correlation of misspelling
and impulse shopping :)

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tszming
10 Big Myths about copyright explained
<http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html>

~~~
invisible
And the relevant tidbit: "Facts and ideas can't be copyrighted, but their
expression and structure can. You can always write the facts in your own words
though."

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kwyjibo
It's not a fact, it's a database and databases are protected by law.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
This depends on your jurisdiction.

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ashbrahma
Has anyone downloaded this yet?

