Put your cursor over the bar. there will be a tool tip (or texts) that pops up and shows if there is low competition, medium competition or high competition. It will actually tell you.

Hi CSS,

As you know, the advertiser competition bar tells you how many ppl are advertising on adwords for that search term.
If you are looking to advertise thru adwords, ideally, you want the bar to be near empty so you do not have to bid too high just to make the first page of Google.

Spyfu will be saying that more is better in regards to setting up a site with Adsense on it. The more advertisers paying for ads, the more targeted your ads will be on your site.

In your example, a phrase with high search numbers and half a bar can mean one of two things.
1. Not many people have found this word to exploit it. (rare, but does happen)
2. It is a niche that is not geared towards being financial so not many pple use adwords for it.

Good Craig, that is what I was thinking. I have already built the site and just trying to narrow down my keywords for the domain. This is a pretty big market yet I have identified many micro niche words in it. Some of them are really hitting the numbers high. Target date is roughly Feb 2010. I want to have EVERYTHING ready to go. I am learning a lot from the forum and look forward to seeing results for my campaign.