WebProNews

Google's AdSense program is a joke on both ends.  I send a decent number of clicks to the site--and a lot of impressions--and I make only the slimmest fraction of what I made when I first signed up.  When you first sign up, before AdSense is 'optimized' to your site, with traffic like mine you might make $5 to $6 a day.  Once the site is 'optimized' you will make around 1/4 of that.

Google encourages you to not use more than 3 ads per page and no more than 3 line ads (two different types), which would saturate your page with ad content and leave little or no room for genuine content of your own.  If you do that, you'll still make very little compared to what smaller ad networks (which are going out of business thanks to Google pressure) will make.

So let's say you advertise on Google AdSense, to try to get some of that publicity for yourself.  I tried that, foolishly.  While I was being paid myself somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 to 8 cents per click when someone clicked an ad on my site, I was paying other people 25 to 30 cents per click when someone clicked on one of my text ads on their site.  It just doesn't compute.

Google's advertising program is horribly broken.  I agree that they need to set guidelines to prevent webmasters from 'tricking' people into clicking.  It's common sense and I'm all for it.  But Google also needs to take a serious look at how it is treating those webmasters so that the program works as it should, rather than how it currently does.