Some factors to consider when building your adsense revenue based business, smartpricing could mean your earnings drop drastically, same traffic - same CTR, earnings down by 80%, you get no warning and no justification or feedback to rectify the problem.
Add in that google may just ban you, yes its unlikley if you are playing fair, but it could happen
then I read this
http://www.jensense.com/archives/200...orly_conv.html
and realised I'm not alone with these concerns, where does the money saved in a PPC amount being reduced by smartpricing go to, the advertiser, well google say yes, but how do we know, only google know, and they don't give the publisher or the advertiser the details. How we do know for example that the 1 USD dollar clicks on your site that cost say 1.60 USD for the advertiser when (after a smartpricing update) changed to say 30 cents on your site are being charged to the advertiser for say 1.30 USD, advertiser saved 30 cents - great, you lost 70 cents - bad news, google made an extra 40 cents - smart google!!
For anyone managing their own business, they will quickly realise that good decisions require good information, for someone running a business where adsense is major source of revenue, the good information is very hard to come by, thats bad business sense in my book.
The good news is as YPN becomes more available then the serious competition will cause us publishers to get either a better service or a better choice of service.
As it is adsense is very easy to implement, the contextual ads mean the publisher has little to do while google try for the best ads for the content, and the click revenue seems reasonable for a lot of people, so I think adsense is still a good product, but the lack of information available means for anyone but a hobby website looking to cover the hosting fees and maybe pay for lunch is taking a serious risk relying on the adsense revenue
