Having worked recently for a large media company (controlling half the TV, radio, and a sizable chunk of online news to an entire country) we had very close ties to Google i.e. there salesmen where constantly knocking and begging us to use there products. Direct dial numbers to peoples offices etc...
Anyway the thing is adsense would pay anywhere from 2%-10% the value of an advertising campaign which our sales team could source, and if it was a true multi-media campaign across radio, tv ,online Google revenues across the whole network for a month wouldn't even ad up to one sale. Even a standard interactive take over would pay in one week on one site what adsense would for a whole month.
So it was considered a last choice to have adsense on anything, even with foreign exchange rates making the adsense payouts more valuable. Infact we often ran house ads in favour of them as it was considered better value to self promote than run lower return ads.
So I wouldn't be surprised to see lots of other partners taking a similar stance in a tough economic climate by chasing after better returns than Google can offer.
(and yes we had our pages fine tuned for ad sense. We had our SEO team working very closely with Google trying to get things running at highest efficiency/return).
EDIT: If our sales teams figures seem high compared to Googles payouts it would relate to our position in the market and audience. Our sales teams could naturally haggle a far greater rate than smaller websites could.
Anyway the thing is adsense would pay anywhere from 2%-10% the value of an advertising campaign which our sales team could source, and if it was a true multi-media campaign across radio, tv ,online Google revenues across the whole network for a month wouldn't even ad up to one sale. Even a standard interactive take over would pay in one week on one site what adsense would for a whole month.
So it was considered a last choice to have adsense on anything, even with foreign exchange rates making the adsense payouts more valuable. Infact we often ran house ads in favour of them as it was considered better value to self promote than run lower return ads.
So I wouldn't be surprised to see lots of other partners taking a similar stance in a tough economic climate by chasing after better returns than Google can offer.
(and yes we had our pages fine tuned for ad sense. We had our SEO team working very closely with Google trying to get things running at highest efficiency/return).
EDIT: If our sales teams figures seem high compared to Googles payouts it would relate to our position in the market and audience. Our sales teams could naturally haggle a far greater rate than smaller websites could.