Monday’s post on the “Get your million dollars” webpage drew a big response from readers, many of whom commented on the question of the page’s sponsorship (the elusive “Leon”, interviewed by New York Sun reporter William Hammond). A typical response was that of reader T.J. McIntyre, who wrote:

You might already know that this appears to be an attempt to make money via the Google AdSense program. You’ve already commented on this in the related context of paid keywords and asbestos.

As such, I suspect that this site isn’t affiliated (at least directly) with any law firms. The webmaster is probably making the bulk of his money from pay per click advertising. Still sleazy, but if he was linked to specific law firms, he wouldn’t be using AdSense, which gives him no control over which firm’s ads will appear. For more on AdSense see this link.

And, of course, “Leon” is also trying to make money by selling for $100 the document containing supposed secrets of Vioxx litigation that Lawyers Don’t Want You To Know. Reader Matt Baucom suspects the page is “filled with outlandish info just to get people to come and click on the links or purchase the document”. That sounds right, too.

Baucom also writes: “The website itself is hosted from a service called ‘yi.org’ which offers users a dynamic IP service so users can host websites from their home PCs and it updates ‘yi.org’ whenever the home PC IP address changes.”

Meanwhile, a kerfuffle has erupted in some quarters (check the trackbacks) about whether my original post should have alerted readers even more explicitly than it did that the page probably wasn’t put up by a law firm (I thought I went to some lengths to make that clear, consistent with the overall uncertainty about the site’s sponsorship, but there’s no pleasing everyone.) A couple of commenters seem to imagine that unless the site was erected by a law firm, there can’t be any good reason for finding it worthy of comment. Get-rich-quick appetites among some potential claimants? Difficulty in verifying whether people actually took drugs or were harmed by them? We all know those are never problems in pharmaceutical litigation.

Two final notes: David Giacalone has approached the Google ad department to ask whether “Leon’s” site really meets its standards and practices. And the page appears to have been taken seriously by a writer for the Times of India (who favors the litigation). Yet more: Dec. 22.

Filed under: asbestos