Interesting – Yahoo made some anonymized search advertising data available on EC2 for use during CMU Hack Day.
Even with the keywords and account names anonymized to hexidecimal strings, there’s a lot of valuable information in that data if you could get at a copy. Number of accounts, distribution of revenue per account and how this mix has changed over time, for example. And since keywords and not entire keyword phrases have been anonymized, any account doing a substantial amount of volume on a large keyword set consisting of phrases ought to be able to back out the actual keywords (and then figure out how their competitors are doing) from the data set.
Although we can’t play with the data legitimately, the developer I linked has put some interesting analysis up on a Google Docs spreadsheet – money made per day and money made per ad rank. Again, anonymized, and I’m not sure whether the numbers have been fudged – but if the ‘money’ column is in cents Yahoo brought in about $2.3MM a day in search revenue over this unnamed period. (Does that sound right?)
