Is Tiger Woods better value than Michael Jackson?

Davey Winder
Wednesday, 16 December 2009 16:47

Your IT - Home IT

It might be a below par Christmas for Tiger Woods, but web advertisers are celebrating a revenue generating hole in one.

While reports are coming in that, following the media coverage of that car accident and everything that came after it, Tiger Woods is discovering the financial penalty for his alleged misdemeanors with advertisers dropping him from campaigns, the same cannot be said for the web advertising community.

In fact, it would appear that the media feeding frenzy surrounding a fall from grace for the worlds' first billionaire sportsman has led to something of a Christmas bonus for those who make their money out of eyes on web pages.

According to Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz the number of people searching for 'Tiger Woods' has given the search site a 'huge uplift' and that in turn means good news for web pages relying upon off the page advertising to pay the bills.

It has even been suggested that mentioning Tiger Woods (and yes I do get the irony of this being a story about Tiger Woods on an advertising supported site) is now guaranteed to get you more hits, and more revenue, than recently dead celebrity name dropping such as Michael Jackson for example.

This is particularly true for the Australian market, it would appear, with Australia currently ranking fifth (behind US, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand) when it comes to Tiger Woods web watching according to Google trends.

One web analyst, Will Critchlow, explained the search value of Woods to Channel 4 News :  "In a pure search sense Tiger is a smaller story than Jackson. But this time what web-users want to know is who, where, when - rather than with Jackson there was initially just one question - is he dead?"

Unfortunately, it looks like the bad guys are also benefitting from the Tiger Woods search effect with hackers poisoning search results to get gossip hungry readers clicking on Trojan-installing links.