About IotaWeb

IotaWeb began as a personal project for Tony Wright, founder of CraftyTraveler.com.

In Spring of 2005, I began publishing an online database of Travel Guides at www.craftytraveler.com with the sole source of revenue for the site being from the Google Adsense program. After noticing that some ads had dramatically higher values than others, I began searching for a source of high-paying travel keywords to get a sense of which articles I should pursue to maximize revenue. What I found was a morass of resources, virtually all of which wanted to charge (anywhere from $25 to $100) for a single list of keywords, sorted alphabetically.

While this might be valuable for publishers who were tried to scam the Adsense system with auto-generated content, it was virtually useless for the CraftyTraveler web site, which was focused entirely on travel destinations-- and virtually useless for most honest Adsense publishers out there, who simply wanted to know ways to adjust their writing slightly to produce the highest value ads.

So I began cataloging travel keyword values from a wide variety (often frustrating) sources. While researching keywords, I saw a definate needs for a free and searchable database of high value Adsense keywords. As Yahoo stands ready to complicate things by adding YPN to the mix (as a direct competitor to Adsense), it seems that a tool that would allow for a comparison between the two programs would also be valueable.