petra - 4:05 pm on Apr 10, 2005 (gmt 0)

I believe that Google will either make some serious changes to "smart pricing" or drop it altogether when the serious competition arrives. If not, their overwhelming lead in the number of publishers will blow away with the wind.

Doubt it. When competition arrives they'll be as stringent if not more with smart pricing (they'll probably call it smarter pricing lol) The reason for that is that the adsense program or its yahoo/msn equivilent is funded by the adwords program so if yahoo/msn are lax with smart pricing they might get more publishers but they'll lose their advertisers to google thereby eventually killing off their publisher program.