scout - 9:15 pm on Jul 23, 2008 (gmt 0)

I am confident that the content network would be much much more profitable for ROI focused advertisers if Google required advertisers to "opt in" rather than "opt out". I hypothesize there a ton of advertisers that are not measuring their ROI on content because it's blended in with their search data, and as such, are polluting the bid landscape in content with unprofitable max cpc's. For those advertisers focused on ROI, you can typically find very steep decreases in CPC's between ad positions 1, 2, and 3 in the content network.