Poker News
Ban On Online Gambling Expensive For Search Engines
This week saw a cost assessment exercise being conducted to determine the financial impact a ban on Internet gambling paid search ads would have major US search engines, reports Steve Baldwin of WebProNews.
Baldwin used a list of 200 suggestion keywords generated by Google to determine estimated monthly keyword volume and CPC figures, calculating a benchmark figure for money left on the table by the search engines for April 2009, arriving at the conservative projection of a 15 percent CTR rate in paid clicks for every gambling-related SERP.
Initial findings indicate that even a cautious take on the revenue lost to the ban amounts to a staggering $9,632,382 each month, equating to about $115 million annually in possible income.
Extrapolation of these figures with the help of comScore's search query rankings for the same time span of April 2009 only serves to swell the numbers further.
"According to comScore, Google's share was 64.2 percent, Yahoo's at 20.4, and Microsoft at 8.2, which would put Yahoo's monthly loss at $3,060,756 and change, and Microsoft's at $1,230,304," Baldwin reveals as he explains the figures.
He goes on to add, "Ask, with a 3.8 share, is out $570,378 and AOL, with a 3.4 share, is out $510,378. Collectively, then, the money that all the search engines are leaving on the table each month is $15,004,198, or about $180 million a year."
Actual losses could be conceivably larger, bearing in mind Baldwin's modest stance in arriving at his estimates.