I had the opposite impression, from a friend who does adwords for a living and a...

joelrunyon · on April 12, 2015

Parent comment is talking about the entire ecosystem - not the specific markets.

As new markets emerge, it's less competitive (in those markets) and then prices drop (which drop the avg).

In general, CPC doesn't mean much if you talk in total aggregate (you need to look at the specific markets) and CPC still doesn't address volume (which is the other half of the equation).

I'm guessing most of the people decrying the search ads are doing so from anecdotal evidence rather than statistics.