WIRED: Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability

http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_googlenomics

This is an interesting article on Google's Adwords and how it's actually a pricing auction between its advertisers. It gives some background history and some analysis on how these adwords work. Funny how everything we do on Google can be tied to how they profit from their ads, and affect the pricing of these ads on Google.

It matches pretty well what goes on in HW and in class lately.

I recently started a website and put a small google AdWord box in order to offset the hosting costs.

Before using this service, I have always thought that google would pay a fixed rate for every click made.

Turns out that different keywords and different websites are priced differently, as described by OP's auction model.

Some are actually priced to few dollars for a click, and some just few dozen pennies. So it is my job to get google to offer expensive links and also get more people to click on them.

Interesting read though, thanks OP for linking this article that is actually relevant to what I am doing irl.