A Case in Point

Claude was still dubious. "So how much money can I make?" he asked me. "I bet it's not much."

"It depends on two factors," I answered. "How many visitors does your site get? How much are the advertisers willing to pay you? Multiply the two together and you'll know how much money you'll make."

Claude was direct: "So how much money do you make?"

Vioxx

Merck's official Vioxx withdrawal announcement is at www.memwg.com/vioxx-withdrawal/.

I was expecting this question. "It varies from month to month, really. When I first displayed the ads, I made on average less than a dollar every day. Some days it was just a few cents, some days it was over a dollar."

He wasn't impressed. "That's not a lot!"

"No, it's not," I allowed, "but considering that it costs me only $10 a month to run my Web site, it was already covering my expenses. It also encouraged me to add more content to my site in order to attract more visitors. After a few months, I was making between $20 and $60 a month. Again, I wasn't getting rich, but I was making money. I think it's a realistic range for a lot of sites."

"But then," I continued, "I got lucky." And I told Claude my Vioxx story.

The Vioxx Recall

In September of 2004, the pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co., Inc., announced that it was voluntarily withdrawing Vioxx, one of its star drugs, from the market. (Note that Vioxx is a registered trademark of Merck & Co., Inc.) They did this because of a study that showed that long-term users of Vioxx, a pain reliever popular with arthritis sufferers, had an increased risk of strokes and heart attacks. The recall generated a media frenzyit was front-page news on most major newspapers the next day.

As it happens, I had been using Vioxx myself at that time for pain relief, but I wasn't a long-term user. So although I wasn't in dangerthe risks were only apparent after at least 18 months of usethe recall still gave me pause.

The day after the recall, I had a funny thought. I had actually heard about Vioxx well before my doctor prescribed it. Why? Because Vioxx was prominently featured in many of the unsolicited emailspopularly known as spamthat I receive. Wouldn't it be funny if there were a noticeable drop in spam worldwide as spammers scrambled to find an alternative drug to promote?

Spam, Spam, Spam

Try www.memwg.com/about-spam for a good overview of what spam is and what you can do about it.

A Parody Is Born

The Vioxx Parody

The full text of my Vioxx parody is available online from the book's Web site at www.memwg.com/vioxx.

What started out as a funny thought quickly became a full-fledged humor piece. A couple of hours later, I had transformed the initial joke into a fake press release and placed it on my Web site. Here's how it starts:

Pharmaceutical giant Merck's surprise withdrawal yesterday of its anti-arthritis drug Vioxx (also known as rofecoxib) caught more than just Wall Street by surprise. Although most media attention was focused on arthritis sufferers and other patients who were taking Vioxx for general pain relief, spammerswho prefer to call themselves "bulk email providers"were dealing with their own anxiety issues.

"Vioxx is an important drug for us," says acknowledged spam king Pone Leray. "There are literally millions of people out there with arthritis and similar conditions who have been able to find relief using Vioxx. Now we can't market it to them anymore. We've had to temporarily suspend many of our mailings while we figure out how to best deal with the problem."

After the parody was up on my site, I sent a link to it to a few of my friends and turned my attention to other things. As I explained to Claude, that's when the excitement really started.

The Ads

I routinely check my AdSense account, even on weekends, because one of the great features about AdSense is that revenue is tracked by the system as it happens, with very little delay. That Saturdaytwo days after the Vioxx recall and one day after I had written the parodyI made just over $26 from the ads on my site (Figure 1.4). This was a much higher value than normal for my site. What had happened?

Figure 1.4. First-day earnings from my Vioxx parody.

As it turns out, one of the tongue-in-cheek "predictions" I had made had come true. In the parody, I had a so-called "industry analyst" (whose name is actually an anagram for what do I know) talk about the impact of the Vioxx recall on Google's revenues:

"Google's revenues might actually increase because now a lot of lawyers and consumer advocacy groups will start buying ads urging people to sue Merck. Lawyers are willing to pay a lot to find the right people to file for class action suits. This could actually be a short-term bonanza for Google."

This particular prediction was right on the money. Almost overnight, law firms had started placing Vioxx-related advertisements. They smelled opportunity (expensive litigation) and were looking for potential clients. And they were willing to pay to get to them. As I discovered, the lawyers were paying Google several dollars per click, an unusually high amountper-click fees of between 5 and 50 cents are the norm. The Vioxx recall was definitely good for Google, and, by extension, good for me!

The Response

Once I realized what had happened, I knew I had to act quickly in order to capitalize on my good fortune, because interest in Vioxxand hence the number of available advertisementswould surely wane as time passed. Over the next few days, I worked to make more money from my parody by doing these things:

• Fine-tuning the text of the page.

• Experimenting with the number of ads on the page and their layout.

• Directly telling more people about the page.

• Indirectly telling others about the page by including a link to it as part of my signature in emails and forum postings.

• Adding related pages and linking to them from the orig inal page.

In the end, I made over $350 that month from Vioxx-related content, almost all profit. And it was fun to do.