Almost nobody charges per impression unless their clients are imbeciles or it’s a branding exercise, and higher impressions (with the same amount of clicks) mean a lower CTR.

If you do click, but don’t buy, you then lower the conversion rates, and the sponsors will likely pay less money per click.

As a journalist and board member of the Authors Guild, I’ve watched in dismay as writers, living and dead, have suffered steep drops in income and copyright control thanks to Google’s — and its smaller rivals’ — logistical support for pirating and repackaging everything that we writers, editors, and publishers hold dear.

Dead writers “suffer” nothing, of course, although their heirs might. Of more interest is who really made out like a bandit in the Authors Guild lawsuit against Google, and it seems to be the Authors Guild itself. Also of note on that same page is that the Guild helped remove text-to-speech on the Kindle, ostensibly on behalf of authors who might lose out on separate audiobook sales, although IMO the audience for audiobooks (and therefore the availability) is limited almost entirely to bestsellers, so the only authors who would suffer any drop in income (probably not terribly steep) would be those that are already bringing in tall coin. And then people like MacArthur wonder why readers end up pirating stuff with OCR and the like.

Oh, and MacArthur needs to attend anger-management classes with Alex Jones.

by the way, on another note, I enjoyed your performance in Sullivan’s Travels (the movie that inspired “O Brother Where Art Thou?”).  I’ve even used a soundbite from your performance in this movie for a song project I was doing a few years back.

A specific set of writers, one might be able to make a case for(newspaper journalism certainly hasn’t had a good time of late, though the bleeding really started with cable, well before the internet was mass-market), independent writers have always had mixed fortunes(see also: “Grub street”) and have had both ups and downs with the internet; but teachers?

America’s Grand War on Public Servants has certainly been a problem; but that isn’t really an internet thing, and the internet is about as unlikely to get a class full of students to sit down and start learning as anything short of amphetamines… At the college level, the ruthless gutting of actual professorships in favor of permatemps is nothing short of shameful; but also largely unrelated to the…um…less than terrifyingly competitive online degree mills.

There is definitely an argument to be made that the internet has crushed paper journalism(if, not that they’d want to say so) more by taking over the ad money than by even bothering to compete with the prose); but this guy wants to extend that into some full-scale decline of all prose-related intellectual functionaries?

1 – Policy decisions are often irrational “me too” behavior that imitates another company’s mistake.
2 – Bidding may be in the hands of a bored intern who just keeps hitting the “bid” button as if he’s playing video poker.
3 – Someone may have foolishly signed up for the “let us manage your account for you” feature (whatever that’s called).
4 – Bids are definitely being driven by m2m transactions that are generating bullshit ads (Get Hydraulic Gravel Crushers At Walgreens!) 
5 – Monopolistic behavior such as Google setting minimum bids without regard to the number of competitors.  If there is only one competitor, Google may still demand a bid of $0.60 to get on the first page search results, not a nickle.
6 – People have no idea what they are doing and bid to be #1 in search results.

Time to read some Mike Resnick to wash the taste of that guy out of my home town mental associations.

Not that I am a fan of the ‘invisible hand’ theory of capitalism (which is as real as god or the spaghetti monster), but from my 10 year experience, paid ads typically police themselves quite well in what many call a ‘free market’.  either sellers trim their bids in competiton with each other or get burned.

Yeah, I remember the good old days, back before the internet.  When all the teachers and average writers were cruising around in Cadillacs, snorting lines of cocaine off the gleaming perfection of their solid gold medallions.

I guess I can see it if the thought is that the consumer will browse around and buy something else.