Google Adwords - not sure if off-topic

[Paul W. Frields]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 10:14:30AM -0400, Pamela Chestek wrote:
>    Nelson Marques wrote on 04/16/2010 05:36 PM:
> 
>   I had a small chat with a close friend of mine that is Marketing
>  Director in an Italian group represented in Portugal.
> 
>   We had some weird talk about Adword, and it actually I've seen some
>  very weird stats. I've never worked with Adwords before, I am not even
>  aware if Fedora does it, but this was interesting to analyse.
> 
>   They bought some words on adwords and placed a small budget. They
>  bought their usual words, and the most fun part, their competitors
>  words. Strangely, they got roughly 40% of the hits incoming from
>  searches from their competitors. For their case, that strategy seems to
>  work fine (Ceramic Industry).
> 
>   Not sure if the same could apply to us, or even if we use adwords, in
>  case we do and are not exploring it that way, I would suggest a test on
>  it for some "relevant" statistical data.
> 
>   Just a thought...
> 
> 
>    Voice of Red Hat Legal here.  Using others' trademarks for AdWords is a
>    challenging area legally, heavily litigated in the US and EU.  I'll need
>    to be involved in any decision-making about it.

Pam, thanks for the heads-up.  However, I think there's a deeper issue
with AdWords, which is the freedom of the code that produces it.
Typically Fedora doesn't embrace using services that aren't based on
free software.  Before we got anywhere close to spending time on
AdWords, we'd have to reconcile that with our freedom stance.

I also want to advise that, while new ideas are a great thing to have,
that idea needs to be backed both by our core values, and by someone's
specific commitment of time to make those ideas a reality.  Otherwise
we become mired in a pool of great ideas without being able to make
measurable progress on any of them.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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