I have found that the ad revenue only sites are really driving up the costs of advertising in the last year - is your experience the same? Is google or yahoo doing anything about it?

Yes I am finding the same - these sites offer no value and they drive up our costs I hope google does something about them

I thought I read somewhere that rather yahoo or msn was trying to address this by having another factor other than ranking determine the price of your advertisement. They are looking into the quality of your advertisement - content & click throughs. If that is the case it will kill the ad revenue sites.

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I think it is yahoo with the quality criteria. I haven't spent much time looking at it because it looks a little confusing and how do they really determine the quality of an ad. I do like the concept though.

Here is a quote from the yahoo site:

With the new ranking model, an ad’s rank in search results is determined by bid amount and ad quality:


Ads with more bars means higher quality and may require a lower bid to attain a position, and/or may receive better placement on the page.
Ad quality is a measure of how relevant an ad, and it is determined in comparison to other ads displayed at the same time. Factors that influence ad quality are:
The ad's expected performance – which is determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!’s ranking algorithms
The ad’s historical performance – its click-through rate relative to its position on the page
You can gain an understanding of your ad’s overall quality by looking at its quality index. Learn more about quality index.
The quality index is only available once you’ve upgraded to the new Sponsored Search system.