The Ask Jeeves ad network
Gary Stein of Jupiter research provides some analysis of Ask Jeeves setting up its own pay-per-click ad network.
A quote caught my eye:
"Assumedly, most of Jeeves' current users will shift over to the new system (hopefully they had large numbers of customer service reps on hand today). Some number of Google advertisers who were enjoying good returns from AJ will shift over to re-capture their traffic."
I think everyone will need to watch this very, very carefully. In theory, a click of jeeves traffic is a click of jeeves traffic, whether it came via a Google network ad or a Jeeves network ad. And since the Jeeves network starts out with far fewer advertisers, clicks on Jeeves' network should be much cheaper than on Google's.
So this is potentially a really big risk for Google. Even if advertisers don't actually leave the Google network, the huge increase in quality ad inventory should help keep PPC rates down.