Highest Paying Search Terms: Cancer & Asbestos

I've never seen CyberWyre before, but I just read its list of Highest Paying Search Terms and the comments on monetizing cancer seem really grotesque.

Maybe I'm stuck in my spoiled little smug bubble where I think that seeding a site with sloppily pieced together info on cancer caused by asbestos exposure (mesothelioma) is pretty low. But, I imagine traumatized patients returning home from the doctor's office to research their scary new diagnosis and disappointingly finding these link farms sites.

Obviously, lawyers are willing to pay top dollar to secure clients for class action lawsuits, employment law and environmental law. Mesothelioma-related law services allow plaintiffs to recover their medical costs from large corporations who've cut corners and exposed employees to toxins. The lawyer gets a percentage of the trial win, the client gets to keep their house, and justice is served for employees. However, those creating the asbestos-related sites are simply cutting and pasting Wikipedia info and whatever else they can find online in order to game the ad networks. Accuracy takes a backseat to keyword payouts and on a smaller level, these bogus content creators are taking shortcuts in the same way that the offending corporations did - at the expense of their audiences. This worries me.

A few years ago I visited my mom's house and saw a bottle of diet pills in the bathroom with ephedrine listed as a major ingredient. She said she'd been given the bottle by a woman at her monthly mahjong game and that she'd researched it and read that it was safe. I'd only ever seen deejays and serious grad students try ephedra and develop habits. I was neither, but I made my mom watch Requiem for a Dream just the same. She made it half way through the movie, told me I was sick, and threw away the pills.

While I know my mother should seek medical advice from a real doctor, I can't help but think about all the people who can't afford medical coverage and who put their faith in self-diagnosis and online research. It's for those people that I find the practice of laissez-faire link farming disgusting. Don't get me wrong. I understand that for some, being a publisher is a job. In this particular case I think it's better to put reputable cancer-related links into an aggregation system and sell ads, then it is to republish what might be inaccurate info. While I love accessible resources, it pains me to see that the problem with the long tail of the web is that it only takes one wrong statement to misguide millions.

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Highest Paying Search Terms: Cancer & Asbestos

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