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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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. <i>Caveat Emptor</i><p>That being said, I thought you might find it interesting.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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).<p>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 <i>the rest of</i> the world's information, but anything Big G thinks is commercially sensitive <i>for Google</i> is guarded like Fort Knox. (Did you know AdSense users can't even tell you the CPC rates they get without violating the TOS?)
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.
Likely this data comes from google's keyword tool, which has a paid API.<p>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.
For those that don't want to download, I'll give you a major theme in this after a quick perusal.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Do note, my example was not included in the file.
Has anyone actually looked at these? Most of them have typos (ie: ameratrade instead of ameritrade).<p>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?<p>I refuse to believe "visaa" ranks higher than "visa" and that "ameratrade" was #1.
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