Jeff Molander_

Google vs. Microsoft: What's Going on Here?

Great thoughts, Jason. Indeed, "Everybody's onto the text ad trick by now" but Google has made some interesting acknowledgments of this fact -- and responses to it (by cleaning up AdWords through creating affiliate-focused restrictions and AdSense through offering more control).

As you seem to be pointing out, it will be interesting to see how social media monetization shakes out considering that it may be monetized in new, innovative ways (beyond the page view and/or cost-per-click). Scott Karp and I seem to believe that Google's new Pay Per Action hedge could explode revs for GOOG in the area of blogs -- opening the door on the gaming of "per action" similar to the way domainers, as an example, have gamed the Pay-Per-Click system. This could spell big opportunity for GOOG in terms of dominating the <strong>smaller&... nooks and crannies of the social Web (vs. the Facebooks)... just as they've done with AdSense.

Speaking of, considering all of your points above, I think we need to also pay some attention to how GOOG is proceeding to clean up its AdSense network via the Pay Per Action scheme and kicking out the Made-for-AdSense crowd.