How Tobey MacGuire made me $3.36

Okay, this is getting weird. Earlier in the month, as regular readers will know, I started to notice a lot of traffic coming to this website from people searching for keyword Toby Mcguire on Google. Careful spellers will know by now that the famous actor, Tobey MacGuire, does not spell his name this way.

In other words, I was the beneficiary of the traffic of the misspelling teen idol fans of the Internet.

Near as I could tell, this traffic was coming this way because a fellow named Matt Mcguire from Tyne Valley commented on a story about West Prince last July.

Of course as I mentioned this, with several uses of the target phrase Toby Mcguire, the popularity of the site in Google, vis a vis Toby Mcguire, the misspelled idol, grew and grew.

As I mostly missed out on the big Internet bubble, I decided that it was time to cash in on my (Toby’s?) newfound popularity. And so I scrounged around and found a poster company with an affiliate program and signed myself up. Then I modified this website so that any traffic coming from anywhere else that has Toby in the URL ends up going to this special page.

The result. This website is now the most popular one on Google for the search Toby Mcguire Photos.

For the first couple of days I carefuly checked my affiliate report two or three times a day, waiting for the teen money to start flowing in. Then I lost interest, and forgot to check for an entire week.

Imagine my surprise today when I checked in and found that I’d earned myself $3.36. That’s US dollars!

How?

Well, one person bought a Toby Mcguire/Tobey Macguire photo.

And, strangely enough (and more lucrative), someone else bought a print of Vase of Roses by van Gogh.

At this rate, I’ll have enough for Oliver’s college tuition in about 97 years. There’s always Spider-Man 2 to hold out for, though, and the new Spike Lee.