Here’s a thing.
If you enter “Chris Barrow” into a Google search engine, you will see two sponsored links.
At the top of the page, Blue Horizons (dental marketing consultants) and on the top of the side bar, my old friend Yvonne Wallace at Designer Dental (dental marketing consultants), Amazon and some guy called Vanish Patel who is running workshops on investment property around the UK.
A little bit of research indicates that these sponsors are paying Google 20p a click for anyone who clicks through.
Chris Barrow sells at 20p a click.
I’d be interested to know what the etiquette is here – because none of these organisations either asked me how I felt about that or told me that they were doing it!
I know the team at Blue Horizons and like what they do – Yvonne is a great friend or ours, Amazon – well I don’t know Jeff Bezos and I doubt he knows me – and Mr. Vanish (whoosh) Patel I’ve never heard of.
But would it have been nice to have been asked – or are we all at the mercy of the free market economy?
I sat with my support team a few afternoons ago, happily clicking on the sponsored links in the knowledge that it was costing 20p a time – he he. Rather childish I know – but I think I do own my name?
Mind you, a scroll down the open listings on “Chris Barrow” will reveal the truth – that I’m not the only human being with that name.
The first notable imposter appears to be a Belgian disc-jockey who runs a web site that sells video clips of old rock groups. You can see “The Chris Barrow Oldies Show” here.
What’s scary is that he looks like a morph of me and Chris Tarrant.
Does anyone out there know if it’s kosher to e-steal somebodies identity for Google purposes – I wonder how much it would cost if I sponsored George Clooney?
He appears to get more hits than I do – and a search on his name reveals 2.6 million entries, compared to my 1.3 million.
I cannot understand why.