Advance and Be Mechanized

I haven't read about this phenomenon but surely the little secret must be out: there is a proliferation of web sites with little content set up with the only purpose of hosting Google's AdSense advertising. So far nothing worth mentioning but the funny thing is that these AdSense facade sites are advertising themselves in Google (through AdWords), hoping that the money they make with AdSense is more than the one they have to pay for AdWords. If it's working (and it seems so, otherwise they wouldn't be paying for advertising) then they have just invented the perpetual (money-making) motion (PM) machine.

Let's see an example. It works with many search queries that include something popular and "tutorial" or similar. For instance: CRM tutorial . Today (and of course this may change rapidly) two of the sponsored links in the right column are CRM-101.com and CRMtutorial.com . If you take a look at these sites you'll know what I mean.

The winners in these perpetual motion contraptions are the little content fronts and Google in terms of money (Google makes more money that it pays these PM sites because they get more from the advertisers in the PM pages, it's like a pyramid scheme). The losers are the users (that click twice, once in the PM link in the Google search result and again in the PM pages) and also Google in the long term because it hurts the quality of its search service.

By the way, of course there are no Perpetual Motion machines you silly, the users in this case are the ones introducing the "energy" in the picture.

Update:

Joel on Software has a good explanation of what's going on.