There has been a lot of talk recently about Google and their smart pricing for AdSense, I have been doing a bit of thinking about it. What I was trying to decide is if it was a good thing or a bad thing.

A lot of webmasters are complaining about it, because they have seen a significant drop in their revenue. I’m one of those webmasters, and you might think that I’m mad about it, except I’m not.

I’m not mad about it because in the long run I see it as a good thing. Smart Pricing is probably going to get a lot of webmasters who runs junk/spam websites out of AdSense and into YPN or the MSN offering.

The end result of this is that Google will be able to bill itself as a premium service and as a result charge more for displaying your ads, and a premium service will attract a premium price, good for Google, and good for good sites.

Unfortunately, Google in my opinion have made some serious mistakes.

1. Not giving the publisher the ability to see which sites are causing the Smart Pricing governor to kick in on their account, the result of this is that some good sites are suffering because of other sites the publisher might own. The result might be that the publisher moves all of their sites away from Google, not the result I believe Google want.
2. Bad Timing. Google have done this just before MSN and YPN are due to launch to the wider community. This I think is a bad idea, they should of done it 6 months ago. By doing it months ago they could of ensured it was only snaring the sites they want to get rid of.

Of course this is all speculation and to answer the question I posed at the start, I believe they are extremely smart, and just a little stupid at the same time, much like an idiot savant can be brilliant at math or the piano, but can’t tie their own shoelaces.