With the geometric growth in the popularity of the Internet all over the world, commerce has taken a new form. Ads posted on websites have always been meant to generate income for the site owner whether they are ads for their own products or ads by sponsors who pay for the ad space. When that did not seem to take off as expected, search engines had the brilliant idea of making ads relevant to those who use their sites.
That gave life to the phenomenon of the pay-per-click ad or the PPC. This generated good income for those who opened their sites for such ads. It has grown so much that it has become an industry in itself only in the recent years.
Advertising in this manner has reached unprecedented heights in the recent years. Industry sources say keyword advertising amounted to just about half of Yahoos estimated $3.7 billion revenue for 2005.
How does it work? Simple. There are two ways: results page ads, and ads in other sites.
When key words are searched using a search engine, the results page will display links to pages that are relevant to those words. These links are placed there through a partnership program between the search engine and the...