The point here is really about what you might call advertising economies of scale -- if one good nets its producer $10 per sale and another $100/sale but the pr

The point here is really about what you might call advertising economies of scale -- if one good nets its producer $10 per sale and another $100/sale but the price and effectiveness of advertising are the same, it's much more exciting to advertise the second than the first. Google is segmenting these markets in a way that newspapers and tv can't: only one person can buy the top keyword per search, so while TV advertising is wall-to-wall insurance, loans, and cars, the same phenomenon expresses itself in google terms through high-priced keywords. As to cord blood: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cord_blood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cord_blood claims that "The cost of private cord blood banking is approximately $2000 for collection and approximately $125 per year for storage, as of 2007." which sounds to me like a pretty high-margin (in dollar terms) business, hence the attractiveness of advertising.