Having both AdWords and AdSense accounts gives you a perspective that AdSense publishers "only" do not have. I know that the majority of my AdWords budget is going to garbage, and I get more tired of it every day. I will not pay more than 5 cents for any click in the geographic area I target. Since 70% of the people clicking my budget away are not legit why should I? So now that AdSense is down I cannot complain. I think AdSense as we know it is in the twilight years of it's existence. There will be a major transformation and many of the small sites with little traffic will be left behind. And also a lot of the questionable sites Google has tolerated in the network will be going bye bye. There is just too much garbage out there hurting the whole industry and things are going to change.
No I do not think PPC or Adsense will dead any time soon. People want traffic to sell there products. From what I understand most of the Ads on content networks are just affiliate creatives. So definitely PPC and CPA go hand in hand. Someone has a website and doesn't want to be bothered with affilate stuff. I know I don't enjoy looking threw catologes and picking aff products for me this is time consuming and I don't have time, so I put PPC on my website and those advertisers trying to sell there affiliate products will gladey take the traffic for what CPC. Without PPC the affiliate marketer would also die, where are you going to get traffic? Off Search engines? Bum marketing? That would only go so far, those listing in SERPS are already seen as spam and most people hate that shit when they search for something and click on the top 10 listings and find some landing page selling some aff product. But as the vice versa its also spammy to click on the serps and find those mfa with adsense all over them, like this http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=css+for+great+font+and+links&btnG=Google+Search I think #2 (jryj.com/8-great-fonts-to-use-in-css-64) thats obvsiouly some mfa shit there, both of which are just annoying. I think what filipina said above about too much garbage out there hurting the whole industry is true for both bum marketing and PPC is it polluting the SERPS heavily. You can watch an interesting video here about this by the owner of Mahola human powered search... blah blah well I'm going all over the place. But I'm drinking alot of coffee.
It has been a yo-yo month for me with a high day followed by several low days. But here is part of our situation right now. Advertisers have less money to spend due to the current economic downturn. Less money spent, less revenue going into Google's coffers. Notice that Google's latest financial report showed a decrease in profits and that rebounds to publishers making less. Barring a repeat of the Great Depression where the world's economy fizzled for about 10 years, this will change. People and businesses adapt to the increased prices of oil and so on and the economy swings upward again. We have to weather this storm, work smarter and survive to enjoy better profits in the future.