Microsoft is way down, too.

Quoted: Google announced their Q2 results today after the market had closed. Shares are down by as much as 12% as earnings growth reported was below analysts expectations. Net income for the quarter was $1.25B, up from $925M. The company reported a profit of $4.63 per share, which was slightly below the $4.72 average expectation from Wall Street analysts.

Quoted: Mr. Armstrong, who is 37 years old, describes Project Spaghetti as an effort to fix the plumbing behind all of Google's ad initiatives. The inefficiencies, he says, are a product of Google's rapid growth and its innovation. Streamlining the systems and developing new ad formats, he says, should eventually improve the company's bottom line.

This has been my theory as to the decline in Google's paid click metrics (and the corresponding drop in the stock). Good to see someone else in agreement!

Quoted: The short story: the changes to the clickable area in Google ads has resulted in a decline in accidental clicks, resulting in the overall click rate to decline. If Google is seeing a decline in CTR it’s at least in part due to its November decision.

Don't fully understand this.

Quoted: Most people think that the search and advertising markets are both likely to be extremely profitable for the top two players if there’s a duopoly; if on the other hand it settles down as a triopoly, then the margins will get squeezed and #2 and #3 will have a hard tie doing better than break-even. Right now, in the US, Google’s #1 in both, with Yahoo! #2 and Microsoft #3.

Nice. We had to set this up ourselves since there was no hosted version.

Quoted: OpenAds, a free and Open Source ad network with more than 30 thousand installs, has announced a forthcoming hosted version of its service and another round of venture financing. RWW's Sean Ammirati discussed OpenAds and the desirability of a hosted version in a May post here titled Google's Potential Vulnerability - An Open Ad Network

Refave. It's interesting that apparently a vertical merger is not considered grounds for anti-trust whereas a horizontal merger can be.

Quoted: The two companies operate in two different stages of the ad-placement process, so the commission viewed the merger as a vertical one. Microsoft argues that the deal would still affect horizontal competition on the Internet — which, though the document does not mention this, would include Microsoft.

Google has revamped AdSense quite a bit, making it easier to customize ads and define channels through the UI, as opposed to having to change your code.

Quoted: URL channels are easy to implement. There are no changes to your AdSense ad code, so you can create your channels from within your publisher account, and immediately begin tracking performance.

I was expecting something like this.

Quoted: Microsoft contends that Google’s $3.1 billion deal to buy DoubleClick would hurt competition in the online advertising market.