"Their eye is still very much on their own bottom line, not the advertisers." I know for a fact that Google is balancing advertiser ROI against advertising spe

"Their eye is still very much on their own bottom line, not the advertisers." I know for a fact that Google is balancing advertiser ROI against advertising spend and ensuring that they don't upset the apple cart. However you are absolutely right that Google is maximizing their profit – having the ROI numbers in hand lets them drive down overall sales-from-adsense margins while still keeping the customer. So my original point is that if Mahalo was flat out non-performing crap, it would be tossed. An argument could be made though that they use the Mahalo stuff to grow ad inventory, while balancing out the ROI to their advantage since it likely converts on the lower end of the scale.