alt Hacker NewsThat’s pay to spam. Letting advertisers determine relevance of their product to a keyword is not exactly a user enhancing experience. When searching for rav4, i give you the ad for taylor swift concert, obviously understanding you can pay for it. This is spamming. “Relevant” ads should be determined by content producers
Would you, while shopping for a car, decide to buy very expensive concert tickets? Neither would I. So this campaign would have very low CTR and would perform poorly.
It would only perform well if you identified some actual source of latent demand. For example, maybe many people searching for Taylor Swift concert tickets would actually be happy with movie tickets to see a simulcast. At which point, you are providing real information to some searchers.
We can debate and disagree about whether this is something you want in your search results, but it’s not spam. Spam exists because it doesn’t have to compete in an auction.