>The truth is I think Google's adsense business has never had any real true value to customers.
I doubt that adsense has positive overall value to advertisers either. Weigh the amount you spend on the ads against the amount of profit you get from the revenue resulting from that advertising. Some people will be able to make it work but I really don't think it's a large percentage.
According to Wikipedia Google made $42 billion in adwords revenue in 2012. That's like $6 from each person on the planet.
Do adwords really have enough power to increase operating profit by that much?
When I was in high school, I worked for a farmer whose primary product was hay, as he was getting old for dairy. He was able to correlate the value of $1 investment in advertising (mostly weekly newspapers and ads at horse facilities) to sales. He used a pencil, penknife (for sharpening) and a bound marble notebook from the drugstore to do this.
At the end of the day, there may be businesses blowing useless dollars on advertising, but businesses that don't watch their dollars don't tend to last very long.
> Weigh the amount you spend on the ads against the amount of profit you get from the revenue resulting from that advertising.
I'm kind of assuming that every company doing advertising is continually making that calculation, and deciding that it does come out in their favour. Otherwise we wouldn't see nearly so much advertising.
That would be true for the old media. OTOH, online advertising is extremely data-oriented, especially in the US. Most business decisions are based on data. Businesses may be using wrong models or assumptions about the correlation or causation between advertising and revenue, but there is a very strong effort to analyze data for revenue growth.
I doubt that adsense has positive overall value to advertisers either. Weigh the amount you spend on the ads against the amount of profit you get from the revenue resulting from that advertising. Some people will be able to make it work but I really don't think it's a large percentage.
According to Wikipedia Google made $42 billion in adwords revenue in 2012. That's like $6 from each person on the planet.
Do adwords really have enough power to increase operating profit by that much?