See_It_Now - 2:56 pm on May 9, 2008 (gmt 0)

I have a number of informational sites that I run adsense on. I started a new site and decided to give it a little boost with a modest adwords campaign. This was my first use of adwords, I'm in the 'Starter Edition'.

So, the ads that show up in the search results seem to me to be doing OK. They get clicked a few percent of the time, my site matches the keywords, cost-per-click is reasonable, everyone is happy.

In the content network, however, the click rate is way less than one tenth of one percent. It seems to me to be a waste of my attention, the publisher's space, and Google's effort. When I start to turn off the content network, however, Google begs me to stay in it.

As a publisher myself, I expect the click rates for ads shown on my sites to have a click rate in the 'few percent' range.

My questions:
- why such a crummy click rate on the content network?
- might this improve over time? It's been about three weeks so far.
- how can this work as a business model for Google and the publishers?