The Google AdWords Happening

Christophe Bruno, April 2002

How to lose money with your art ?

At the beginning of April, a debate took place on rhizome.org mailing list, about how to earn money with net art. It suggested to me an answer to an easier problem : how to spend money with my art (if you understand everything on how to spend money, you should in principle understand also how to earn money, because of conservation laws...)

I decided to launch a happening on the web, consisting in a poetry advertisement campaign on Google AdWords . I opened an account for $5 and began to buy some keywords. For each keyword you can write a little ad and, instead of the usual ad, I decided to write little "poems", non-sensical or funny or a bit provocative.

I began with the keyword "symptom". The first ad I wrote was :

As soon as the campaign was launched, I was able to see the results. Every time somebody was looking for the word "symptom" in Google, they could see my ad in the top right corner of the page.

My first satisfaction occured when somebody who had typed "hemorroid symptom" on Google arrived on my website, after having clicked on my ad.

I decided to explore this new world and to launch several campaigns. Each of them was to be a targeted poetic happening of a new kind.

How 12,000 people saw my "poems" in 24 hours and how I was censored by Google

In 24 hours, I launched the following campaigns, with the keywords "symptom", "dream", "mary", "money".

Impr. means the number of times the ad is shown on a page
CTR is the Click-Trough Rate. Here, ad number three got the best rate of click.
Avg CPC is the average Cost-Per-Click
Cost is the cost of the campaign : every time somebody clicks on your ad, you pay $0.05

My ads were then Disapproved and my campaigns were suspended.

I was quite disappointed : I had just started to warm up.

My longer term objectives in doing this were as follows :

The price of words : towards a generalized semantic capitalism

One of the most interesting fact is that we have reached a situation in which any word of any language has its price, fluctuating according to the laws of the market.

Words already had some kind of exchange value, but we hardly realized it : if I insult somebody, I will get something in return, such as a punch in my face for instance. But now there is no doubt anymore. The word "sex" is worth $3,837, the word "art" $410, "net art" is only $0.05 (prices on the 11 of April 2002). And the most expensive word is "free"! Prices are determined according to the number of search requests and an average Cost-Per-Click.

At first sight, there may be something healthy in the fact that words may have a price. If you know you have to pay, you are more careful when you have something to say. And if you see that every person who clicks on your link, makes you lose 0.05$ (as it is the case in the Google system), you think twice before writing your sentence.

But of course there is another side to this story and I have the intuition that this could be a big event in the history of mankind. There aren't many events like that : the invention of writing is one of them for instance. Right now, we may not realize the importance of this fact because the web is not such a big part of our existence. But imagine the day when a search engine will rule the whole textual content of the web, in which the memory of mankind will be stored.Think of the power in their hands.

Google's laws

I understand quite well why they didn't let me do what I wanted to do. But I don't agree with the reasons why I was censored. I believe that the censorship rules of Google are not in accordance with the power and the importance of the tool they have created. Such a tool should be used more freely and should be self-regulated. Actually I cannot say what would be the real interest of Google in this story (a part from the short term interest). Obviously they don't want to take risks. We'll see what will happen in the near future.

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