HOWEVER, as far as I understand it, from a business perspective, the way adwords works is that Google will usually disable the bidding if there are not enough searches. In the cases of specific websites or product names Google can make it very expensive to bid on it for reasons having to do with the usefulness of the landing page. If a user is searching for a specific author/product, the click should satisfy the clicker. If it does not then the cost of staying in that search goes up until the clicks prove otherwise. This benefits Google because it provides a better user experience, which is paramount to Google and all other search engines, even at the expense of profits.
In other cases if not enough people click on an ad then Google will raise the price of the click or disable the ad because of a lack of clicks.
In this case the advertiser may be looking to find visitors who like your KIND OF WRITING and will find the website of interest. If it's not of interest then I suspect the ad will disappear in time for the reasons described above.
Regarding the ethics of bidding on a name, Google's algorithm is interested in the ETHICS so far as trying to show relevant ads. As described above, if the ad is not relevant then Google will raise the bid of each click to make it prohibitively expensive unless it's profitable at that rate or disable the bid if not enough people are clicking on the ad, an indication no one is interested in the ad, an indication that it's not relevant, an indication that it's not good for the user.
Ethically, no. You are an ethical person, right? Or do your ethics depend on the circumstance? :o
In any case Google won't charge the advertiser because they're fraudulent.
You must not have understood my first post or you would not be asking that question. I'll spell it out with more detail. ;) The last thing you want is for their ad to become popular. A popular ad has it's CPC lowered as a reward. In fact, a popular ad can drop to as low as five cents per click AND appear as the first result. Is this what you want?
Martinibuster: I guess ethics always depend on the circumstances; but at least, I wouldn’t get myself to do the same thing in a case like this. English isn’t my primary language, but I think I understood you.
Never the less my problem is that I have no power over how popular the ad gets. But as a fairly known writer and author in my field I would think that the ad gets more clicks when it looks like I am connected to it, than if my name wasn’t an ad-word. Especially since my name isn’t the only name that’s been bought in this case.
But for sure, I don’t want the ad, or site for that matter, to be popular at all, its crap.
So what you’re saying is that I can’t do anything about it, I should only hope that the ad doesn’t get popular, right?
The advertiser's idea is that if you like X then you might be interested in Y. But in the real world that does not necessarily convert. In my experience, there is a very low to non-existent ROI (with certain exceptions, like product comparison), so as a practical matter, unless the advertiser is offering a clearly better product, it's not worth pursuing. It will likely disappear on it's own.
