Experiment to obtain higher EPC

[jjohnstn]

Overnight I removed all AdSense ads from all web sites save for one that was generating (what I thought) to be very high EPC ads. These ads generally run $40-$45 per click on Overture.

During the night I received and handful of clicks, but their average EPC was 0.0x... (less than a dime).

Although I don't know precisely what these AdWords go for on Google, I can only assume their somewhat similar in pricing to Overture.

Ideas?

[justageek]

I ran some tests last night. Basically sent a spider out to about 100k sites, grabbed the content, dumped sites that had very little content, first matched individual keywords against FindWhat and Overture, second matched phrases against the two, then took the 4 highest cpc of the keywords and the phrases then matched them. The results are somewhat interesting.

Based on what I saw the average cpc is *much* higher than either site reports in any press. The reason for this must obviously be that since only the top four results are used then it must always going to be higher than being on the serp.

Now, when I compared the two there was a slightly higher average cpc for Overture. I suspect that Overture and Google are close as far as that goes as well.

Why did I do this?

Just to see what will happen when the others release theirs. The way I figure it is if the others will give only a slightly better payoff than Google then the playing field will be even. Both Overture and FindWhat are public so we will always know what Google hides as far as cpc goes which will undoubtly help the others and the sites who may carry them since they'll have some numbers to look at.

I also see the quality of the clicks being increased for the others as they will have the chance to be on the same content page as Google.