So here's an interesting question. If 10,000 people on, say, April 15th did a Yahoo search on the word Mesothelioma then clicked on the top sponsored lawyer link, would said ambulance chaser have to fork half a million dollars over to Yahoo? Even more efficient - how hard would it be for some clever coder to write a few Perl scripts to do this? Just thinking out loud. ----------------------------------------------------- Lawyers Bid Up Value Of Web-Search Ads By CARL BIALIK THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE April 8, 2004; Page B1 "Mesothelioma" may be the most valuable word on the Internet. The rare, asbestos-related cancer is the king of search advertising, a Web phenomenon in which companies bid to get their ads placed high on the search-result pages of sites like Yahoo and Google and then pay when users click on them. While many search ads cost less than a dollar a click, personal-injury law firms looking to land new clients have bid up mesothelioma ads to $90 or more. "It can get to be a bidding war," says Tracy Helser, Web manager for Kazan, McClain, Abrams, Fernandez, Lyons & Farrise, an Oakland, Calif., firm specializing in asbestos cases that advertises on search engines. Paid searches have become a cash cow for search engines and their partners by creating a flexible market for business "leads," which allow an advertiser to reach a new customer. Though it can change daily, the amount advertisers will pay for such leads ranges from as much as $100 for mesothelioma information to $20 for conference-call services and 31 cents for paper clips. Mainly because of a surge in search advertising and its acquisition of search company Overture, Yahoo Inc. took in $635.5 million in advertising-related revenue in the latest quarter, more than triple its year-earlier result. (See related article.) Google Inc. doesn't release financial data publicly, but most of its revenue comes from search advertising. With mesothelioma, it's simple economics, says Chris Hahn, executive director of the not-for-profit Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation in Santa Barbara, Calif. "Why is [mesothelioma] the highest paying keyword? Because there is nothing more valuable than one mesothelioma patient." Lawyers are so eager to attract mesothelioma cases because there is a clear link between it and asbestos exposure. Lawyers say a typical award in a mesothelioma settlement is $1 million, and attorneys get 40%. For cases that go to trial, the mean award in 2001 was $6 million, triple the amount two years earlier, according to a study by think tank Rand Corp. Over roughly two decades of asbestos litigation through 2002, Rand says, mesothelioma cases represented about 4% of asbestos-related cases but 20% of all cash paid out in asbestos-related claims.

From an attorney's point of view, mesothelioma cases, when pursued individually, "are the most valuable cases in the system," says Deborah Hensler, professor of law at Stanford and co-author of several Rand studies on asbestos litigation.

MOUSE MONEY Advertisers bid more for top placements when a Web user searches for key words that carry big paybacks. Key word Top per-click bid* Mesothelioma attorney $70.24 Car accident lawyer 50 Investment fraud 30 Wisconsin mortgage 19 Conference calling 18.22 Casino 14.97 "You can overspend" for mesothelioma search ads, admits Philip Harley, a partner with Paul, Hanley & Harley LLP in Berkeley, Calif., which advertises online and gets about 20% to 25% of its mesothelioma clients from the Web. But, he adds, "if you spend carefully, you get a very nice return. It's a good way to build a client base." For people diagnosed with mesothelioma, the cancer's course is swift. Attacking the protective lining around the lungs, abdominal organs or heart, mesothelioma initially brings on chest pain, coughing and shortness of breath. There are treatments that can extend life, but many patients have less than a year to live once they are diagnosed. The cancer generally surfaces 30 years or more after exposure, and the number of annual diagnoses has been steady over the past decade, at roughly 3,000 cases. Settlements are frequently paid out of bankruptcy trusts established after asbestos manufacturers restructured under Chapter 11, but some healthy companies also face liability. (Far less is spent each year on mesothelioma research than on lawsuits. See related article.) For victims of the rare cancer, the Internet has become a main source of treatment information. Robert Taub, director of the Mesothelioma Center at Columbia University in New York, says that the patients he sees go on the Web within three or four days of diagnosis. David Sugarbaker, professor of surgery at Harvard's medical school in Cambridge, Mass., and chief of thoracic surgery at Brigham Women's Hospital, says that many of his patients watch a Webcast of his radical surgery (at www.chestsurg.org) before they have it. Robin Coffey, speaking just after her husband Mark, age 46, had the surgery successfully in February, said he insisted on watching the graphic video beforehand because "he felt more confident that [the doctor] was smart." Ms. Coffey, of Grand Island, N.Y., says her husband was resigned to die within a year before he found Dr. Sugarbaker online. "To go from having just a year to possibly having much more time is unbelievable," she says. The couple hasn't yet looked into litigation, she says. These Web searches by patients provide fertile advertising ground for lawyers. Paid-search ads typically run at the top or the side of main search results, so if people search for mesothelioma, they get nonpaid results framed by the ads. (In addition to paid-search ads on their own sites, Yahoo and Google provide such ads to third-party companies such as Time Warner Inc.'s America Online, Ask Jeeves Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN in revenue-sharing deals.) When viewers click on the ads, they are sent to lawyer sites with a mixture of information, links to other cancer sites -- and a phone number, online form or e-mail address to contact an attorney. While still a fraction of overall legal-services advertising, online spending rose more than fivefold to $8.7 million between January and November last year, compared with just $1.5 million a year earlier, according to market-researcher TNS Media Intelligence/CMR. Overall, legal-services ad spending was $434.8 million in the recent period. Lawyer Jonathan David, who says he tries many mesothelioma cases out of his law offices near Houston, was recently bidding about $92 a click on Yahoo's Overture ad system to direct those searching for "mesothelioma lawyer" to his ad offering legal services. Meanwhile, Paul Danziger, a Houston attorney, was bidding $45 per click on Overture for his ad, keyed off the search term "mesothelioma." James Sokolove, a lawyer and marketer for partner law firms in Newton, Mass., also spends "significantly" online. He says that in most instances, the client-acquisition cost is about 50% less for paid searching than for TV. This is true even for mesothelioma ads, he says, because their targeted nature makes up for the high price. (Besides mesothelioma, Mr. Sokolove also advertises for clients in drug-recall and stockbroker-malfeasance cases.) Some search-engine watchers are skeptical of the high costs of mesothelioma ads. Fredrick Marckini, chief executive of search-marketing firm iProspect in Watertown, Mass., says he doubts that bids as high as $50 are worthwhile. "The vast majority of people who are engaged in online marketing are not measuring their outcome and return," he says. Yahoo and Google decline to say what portion of their overall advertising revenue comes from high-value keywords like "mesothelioma." A Yahoo spokeswoman says, "Overture has millions of keyword marketplaces and more than 100,000 advertisers, so we are not reliant on any one keyword marketplace." The bidding systems on Yahoo and Overture are similar, but each has its wrinkles. Overture advertisers pay a penny more than the next-lowest bid, per click, and bidding is done publicly online. Under Google's system, bids are available only to advertisers, and Google bidding is capped at $50 a click. Google also takes into account other factors, such as popularity, when determining the order of ads on a search-result page. The high price of mesothelioma ads has had some unintended consequences as firms try other means to land mesothelioma patients. In particular, some firms are attempting to boost their Web sites' spot on search engines' so-called algorithmic, or nonpaid, listings by tweaking the content and links to get a higher ranking. These efforts can include using the desired keywords (like "mesothelioma") frequently near the top of their home page, and including them in the Web address. Due to these efforts, eight of the top 10 nonpaid listings in a recent Google search of "mesothelioma" were for sites sponsored by law firms, pushing down nonlawyer sites such as the National Cancer Institute. By comparison, a search for "cancer" -- a tamer ad category -- produces the American Cancer Society as the top nonpaid result. Lawyers say that they are providing valuable medical and legal information on the rare cancer for free. One recent entrant to asbestos law, Childress & Charpentier in Melbourne, Fla., took unusual steps to climb the free search rankings. The firm snapped up expired Web addresses -- including bmwexperience.com and biotechnology-investor.com -- and populated them with words related to mesothelioma. These sites then redirected to the firm's home page, mesothelioma-and-asbestos.com. The firm tried paid search ads, but found them to be too pricey -- as much as $7,000 to $8,000 per month, according to Carl Peterson, an associate with the firm. --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'