Day: February 22, 2002

Google’s AdWords Select Rocks My World

A couple months ago I experimented with a Google ad for my animal rights site. Considering the site is largely noncommercial, the return on investment was very low. I paid something like $25 total for a few thousand text ads and the response rate was about what I’ve seen on ads I run on my own site — less than 1 percent.

Now, though, Google has followed that up with an excellent cost-per-click advertising system called AdWords Select. This lets people place text ads by keywords, but only pay on a cost-per-click basis.

Currently, for example, I have textads running on about 100 different search words. I’m paying $.05 per clickthrough and can limit the total amount per day per ad (so if I set a $1 limit, after the 20th click-through of the day, the ad will no longer be served until the next day).

Clickthrough rate is still about in the 1 percent range or so, but this is still a bargain basement promotion method (in fact, I’m less interested in clickthroughs than having my shortened URL appear on Google searches for topics like “animal rights” or “peta.”)

This is an incredible — and cheap — promotional tool.

Let Mike Tyson Fight Already

The other day an e-mail from the National Organization for Women crossed my desk. The e-mail was outraged that Washington, DC, had granted Mike Tyson a license to fight and called for people to protest to city officials to have Tyson’s permission to fight revoked. Huh? Let Tyson fight already.

The NOW e-mail complained that Tyson was being investigated for sexual assault by Las Vegas prosecutors. Fine, then lets see police arrest and/or indict him, but until then Tyson has just as much right as anybody to pursue his career and applying political criteria to decide whether or not to allow him to fight is obscene.

As George Getz puts it in a Libertarian Party press release on the Tyson controversy,

If Tyson is willing to fight; if an opponent is willing to step into the ring with him; if the bout is sanctioned by professional boxing organizations; and if fans are willing to pay money to see the fight — then no meddlesome government bureaucrat should have the power to veto it.

Exactly. I was trying to figure out what NOW was thinking with its idiotic e-mail. You’d think a group of feminists would be the last people in the world wanting to blacklist someone from working at his profession simply because he is unpopular or has a criminal record. As Getz said in the LP press release, “We don’t need Soviet-style economic commissars deciding who can work, and where they can work, and under what conditions they can work.”

Boxing commissions should be required by law to render fight decisions based solely on objective criteria as Getz outlines, not based on who NOW or other groups like or dislike. Let Tyson fight already.

Addendum: After this was written, Las Vegas announced, in fact, that it did not have enough evidence to pursue sexual assault charges against Tyson.

Source:

Let Mike Tyson box in Washington: It’s a matter of economic freedom. Libertarian Party, Press Release, February 21, 2002.

Glenn Sacks on Bogus V-Day Statistics

Glenn Sacks wrote an interesting article about a lot of the statistical claims that Eve Ensler‘s nonprofit V-Day was spreading around about domestic violence. The entire article is worth reading, but I was especially intrigued by this claim which Sacks debunks,

1 in 3 murdered females are killed by a partner, versus 3.6% of males.

This statistic is both impressive and absurd at the same time. It is absurd because, of course, it is completely misleading, but impressive nonetheless because somebody obviously spent a great deal of time thinking about the best way to spin the fact that very few women are murdered and then turn that on fact on its head.

As Sacks notes, very few men or women are killed by a partner. According to Sacks the figures are about 1,300 women killed by intimates as opposed to 600 men murdered by intimates. In absolute numbers, of course, almost 2,000 people killed by intimates is a horrific tragedy, but in a nation of 260 million or so people, the risk of being killed by an intimate for both men and women is very low and, more importantly, the rate of intimate murder has steadily been declining (along with other murders).

Few people will look at that statistic, though, and realize that what it really means is that only about 4,000 women are murdered in any given year in the United States compared to almost 17,000 men.

So a completely different way to frame V-Day’s claims about violence against women is that almost 81 percent of murder victims are men and that we have a crisis of male murders and need to respond as a society to do more to reach out to the underserved male population with specialized violence programs offering men help and counseling.

But, of course, Ensler and her ilk take the opposite view and insist that violence (both being a victim of and a perpetrator of) is strictly a male vs. female phenomenon. Or as Sacks sums up his article,

Ensler, whose popular play “The Vagina Monologues” is the primary financial and public relations force behind V-Day, says that, for women, “Afghanistan is everywhere.” Unable to find an Afghanistan for American women, Ensler has used discredited statistics to invent one.

The obvious question being why do radical feminists prefer to live in this dark fantasy land of their own making rather than face the world as it is and work to improve it rather than simply regurgitating back their ideology through false and misleading statistics?

Source:

Eve Ensler’s V-Day: For Women, Afghanistan is Everywhere. Glenn J. Sacks, GlennJSacks.Com, February 22, 2002.