ZDNET reports that the ComScore paid click report for February, the most anticipated metric in the Web world, is not good news for Google. There is much debate about the reasons, but I think users are ignoring paid click advertising, or if they do click, it may well be more for curiosity rather than genuine desire for a transaction. If I am reading my email, do I really want to look at paid click advertising at the same time? 

The story about the decline in google's clicks on its paid advertising lacks one major flaw- it fails to take into account exactly what the mass market reaction is, and also their needs, wants and behaviour.

Sure, Mahaney's suggestions that there are two factors behind the Coverage Ratio decline his solution to this is essentially possible. However, what happened to taking psychology into consideration?

In my opinion, these are the additional factors that contributed to Google's Ratio decline in clicks:
-(Desensitisation to marketing efforts.) Seriously, after the dot com boom/bust and the development of wonderful applications and technologies, the novelty has worn off. Nearly every website has some ad for ringtones and wallpapers crammed into the banner or navigation bar and viral marketing through youtube and myspace is rampant like a devil child. Everything has become clichéd.
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-(Awareness of scams.) Companies like McAfee who are devoted to net security have spent much money in the R&D of softwar such as the Site Trust Tool bar, a handy little thing that informs you of the safety of the site which is being browsed, working on data that has been collected and feedback from user experiennces. Many other companies have similar applications. Simply, if users have these installed, they know that the free ringtone/wallpaper website is actually just going to spam you and charge you through the roof once you give them your details and click I agree. Then, negative experiences occur and the word of mouth effect happens tenfold, being 'teh internets'. Remember that this site may be the very one that pays google to advertise their site in the area with the most traffic.

-(Specific searching.) These days, we have a few household name sites.. Ebay, Facebook, Youtube, Wikipedia. etc. Since these sites are so well known, isn't it possible that many of us don't need to go through google to search for these sites because they're either embedded in our brains lik