birdstuff - 1:10 pm on Apr 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

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.

Doubt it. There is simply no statistical way to accurately predict the liklihood that a given page will convert based upon conversion data, especially when it's so incomplete as it is right now. There are simply too many variables between sites in the same category to accurately extrapolate conversion data from one site to another.

That's why Google is losing so many great sites and publishers from the program because "smart pricing" is driving them to other revenue streams.

The competition will learn from Google's mistakes and do better by placing "smart pricing" where it belongs - in the hands of the advertiser. I hope Google eventually does the same.