The BIG Advertisers are their bread and butter, but every big advertiser knows to avoid most contextual targeting Text Ad buys.
Here's something that came into play around 2009: When a new advertiser (think small business) goes into AdWords to set up their first account, the default is to show Ads on Search AND Display Network. After setting things up, these two sources of VERY DIFFERENT traffic get lumped together in a lot of high-level reporting.
Until they specifically look at the quality of Display vs Search traffic (and see Avg Visit Durations from Display traffic around 5 seconds) they will not know about the crappy quality of sites they are on.
Here's something that came into play around 2009: When a new advertiser (think small business) goes into AdWords to set up their first account, the default is to show Ads on Search AND Display Network. After setting things up, these two sources of VERY DIFFERENT traffic get lumped together in a lot of high-level reporting.
Until they specifically look at the quality of Display vs Search traffic (and see Avg Visit Durations from Display traffic around 5 seconds) they will not know about the crappy quality of sites they are on.