ClickZ: Google's House of Cards

Search marketers, like columnist Nate Elliott, are finding that Google's contextual AdSense system both radically increases inventory, but also radically decreases return on investment relative to search term inventory. Industry scuttlebutt increasingly focuses on demands that Google allow search marketers to make two different bids - one for contextual inventory and another for the other inventory. The company's refusal to comply with this request reveals the conflicting pressures of having to pay publishers a high commission to get them to put AdSense tags on their sites versus advertiser dissatisfaction with AdSense response rate performance.