And they’re not ‘lying to [you]‘ - in plain english, they’ve said they will probably be difficult to use affordably. What I would give for all service providers to advise me if their model would make it difficult to make a profit. Most of the time we find out the hard way!

Personally, I think Google Products is actually one of the best sites for price comparison, probably because it charges no commission so is written with a focus on relevance AND price - the rest stick to cost alone. This is why big name companies like Direct Line have openly refrained from being listed on these sites, because blindly comparing apples and pears just leads to everything else that matters going down the drain. Then those same customers are the first to complain when they get poor customer service.

The bottom line is relevance. The vast majority of price comparison sites piggyback on keyword like “review” “specifications” and others, when they make little or no effort to build a reviewing community. For as long as a search for almost any product on Google returns eight pages of the same category of site, when only a handful are relevant (at a push), I welcome anything which disincentivises these people from advertising.

Regular affiliates have no chance with the ridiculous cost per clicks but I noticed that a few larger comparison sites are still advertising on AdWords (ran a search for Sony KDL-26T3000 and got Pricerunner, Ciao ads etc.). They’re decent sized companies - have they negtotiated a deal maybe? Or maybe it’s a loss leader with branding in mind?

Either way it’s a worrying trend - who’s Google going to pick on next?!