When we register with overture and add keywords, by default they go for both type of searches...content match which gets displayed on different sites and precision search which gets displayed in search engine. I found that, content search r totally totally useless and anybody can earn by clicking on ads displayed on their site. I found from log file so many sites doing same and totally useless. So my advice is to Switch off content match. Same applies to Google also.
OK, I'm biased: AdSense is our sole source of revenue right now. And I have to agree there's no question that there are bad guys out there who are cheating the PPC providers and ultimately the advertisers. And at the start we had trouble with AdSense understanding our pages. Every change we made to our URL structure or page layout had them start over from zero. However we're seeing AdSense working really well at understanding what our pages are about. We're getting a reasonable click-through, CPM, etc. We'd like them to be higher, of course. Our goal is to be big enough - 20 million page views for AdSense, 30 million for Overture - that we can tell them what our pages are about and not have to rely on them figuring it out. I don't know about Overture but AdSense is doing a good job. We do see things where people are targetting on IP. It probably works most of the time but when somebody has an IP in Portland, OR and is looking for a hotel room, they're probably not looking in Portland. But we'll pop up a couple of hotels who've selected IP of the viewer. That's not Google's fault. So my advice would be not to avoid PPC but to focus, focus, focus.
ASP is talking about AdWords and MyPages is talking about AdSense. Although realted, in this context this post makes no sense. I agree that you can make a lot of money as an AdSense publisher but from an advertisers standpoint (ASP), I disabled my content ads a long time ago. Unfortunately, there is a big group of publishers that aren't on the up and up like you MyPages
I suggest that you all don't follow the "content network is bad" statements without investigating. Google is not stupid, the amount of click fraud is much less than people are spouting off. The content network includes sites like nytimes.com, sqlserver.com, and many other major sites that provide quality traffic. When I first heard about the so called problem I almost shut off content but then I looked at my conversions. I looked at over 1000 conversions and found that googlesyndication (content) had a conversion rate of 8.24% while Google search from the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia were all lower. Only google.com.in out performed the content network. I can bid lower on content and they convert better. You can leave this traffic to me.
There's content and content. The trouble is you could spend so much time eliminating the bad content that its hardly worth the effort to secure the good content. I'm also spotting fraud like behaviour coming from an increasing number of affiliate pseudo search engines. I reported one to Yahoo recently. I got the stock automated "we have security systems in place" reply. I just shut off Yahoo entirely. The networks need to clean up their act. They're making too much easy money and getting lazy.
do trial and error for some of my sites having in content works well and for others it doesn't see what works best for u and your sites.
I have it turned off too. I'm paying for someone who's looking for my products, not for someone who may just be clicking the ad out of passing interest.