walkman - 6:10 pm on Oct 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

Wow, that's fascinating. I always think Google's profits lately are from the same gross, but taking a higher percentage. But that's clearly not the case - they actually are growing their business. The 5% growth in CPC seems low - not year over year necessarily, but it sure seems like CPC has tripled or quadrupled in my industry over the last 3-5 years or so.

Google is telling us that prices have gone up 5% total year to year, anecdotal evidence about CPC in certain sites or sectors are irrelevant. Did Google's traffic grow by 16% in a quarter? I'm almost certain that ad prices didn't grow that much during the summer so that explains what went on.