toomer - 3:54 am on Jun 28, 2006 (gmt 0)

Here's a point that seems to almost always get ignored around optimizing revenue. I believe google optimizes (chooses what ads to show) in a way that optmizes across the ENTIRE NETWORK. While context may be decided by your site content, the actual ads shown are intended to optimize across the network, not necessarily for one site.

@rbacal - excellent point ... you summarized what I was trying to get across quite nicely. Ad ad may pay well across the network as a whole, but for my demographic I believe some of those may actually not perform as well for my sites. So the only tool I have, is to block.

I guess this would be the automotive equivalent of saying that one type of tire (i.e.: AdSense using an across-the-network perspective) is the best for all cars? Nope. Some cars need rain tires. Others need snow tires. And some need racing slicks ;-)

So give me all those 3-5 cent ads with those 20% CTR's all day. Will spend it just as I would the 1.00 ads with 0.5ctrs.

This is where I'm not qualified to make any real judgements one way or the other - as I just started in January and am still serving up less than 1,000 impressions per day. So for that few page impressions, I'd prefer to have the high dollar clicks across all my ad blocks right now. Maybe when I'm serving up 50,000 impressions per day I'll consider dropping my competitive ad filter and seeing how it goes. Here's hoping that day comes soon! ;-)