Offshore Gambling
7Search has a list of supposedly the top 100 paying keywords on Google Adsense.
I have no idea if this list is correct but I can only hope it's not. According to it, every single one of the top 100 paying keywords is related to online gambling.
Most blog spam seems to be filled with gambling links; but I wonder if this is because those keywords really pay well, or because the spammers think they do.
High paying keywords spawn content. If advertisers want to advertise on certain kinds of pages, then it makes sense that those pages would come into existence by people who want to make money off of those ads.
But if the highest paying ads are the ones that are going to generate crap content, then this whole Internet thing is in trouble.
Update: Well what do you know, maybe it's not as bad as it appears.
This page lets you search Overture (which runs ads on the Yahoo network) for the price that advertisers are willing to pay for various keywords. "Offshore Gambling" has no bids on it whatsoever.
This is a fluid market. By the time word gets out that a particular topic or keyword is desired, it's probably too late to start creating content targetting it. The sheer crapflood of online casino spam has already sucked up every dollar anyone would want to pay advertising them.
Now if we could only get this word out to the spammers.