Friday, September 5, 2008

Guest Post: Market Value

A second guest post has trickled in. This one's from Anon Philosopher. Enjoy. And keep 'em coming, kids. -- PGOAT

So often, the discussion over philosophy as a profession turns to issues of economics. We now have a way to pinpoint the market value of a variety of philosophical terms. SpyFu.com gives an informed estimate of the amount that Google would charge for advertisement-per-click given an input search term into their search engine. Here are some examples:

"Immanuel Kant" $0.27-$0.57 per click
"Descartes Meditations" $.018-$.034 per click
"Philosophical Gourmet" $1.05-$6.60 per click
"Jacques Derrida" "No results Found"
"Philosophy Job Market" "No Results Found"

I think that we have now found our internet market value.

-- Anon Philosopher

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I knew that Derrida was worthless, but I'm surprised and relieved to see that Google knows it, too.

Anonymous said...

That's not very informative until you have a benchmark to which to compare. For instance, on the same site, here are the costs-per-click for the following keywords:

"business": $0.80 - $3.17
"marketing": $0.89 - $4.07
"finance": $1.07 - $9.89
"law": $0.78 - $3.03
"politics": $0.40 - $1.03
"medicine": $0.61 - $1.96
"ethics": $0.60 - $1.91
"pets": $0.38 - $0.93
"health": $0.81 - $3.25
"money": $0.78 - $3.06
"sex": $0.33 - $0.78
"food": $0.40 - $1.00
"scientology": $0.17 - $0.31
"god": $0.28 - $0.60
"britney spears": $0.20 - $0.39
"harvard": $0.58 - $1.78
"princeton": $0.79 - $3.13

So "Philosophical Gourmet" is right up there (which shows search *demand* by angst-ridden students, not hiring demand!), but unsurprisingly, other phil-related keywords don't fare as well.

Anonymous said...

Huh? Philosophers don't understand numbers and real-world matters like "business"...that's why we make the big bucks.