I too received my Google mood radio this Christmas:

I am sure their heart was in the right place, and on first glance it's a really cool gift. Cooler than the USB hard drives they gave out last year, but not quite as useful.

Then I started to think about my current mood regarding Google, and I have to say, my mood isn't so good. Their new predictive CTR policy placed a large percentage of my keyword on hold this holiday season, and based on the speed of the "in trial" words, I am not sure they will all be running by next Christmas. On top of that, I have search terms with 6% - 20% CTRs on the search network being disabled, and am being told that they "must not have performed above .05% on Google.com. They won't provide partner search CTR rates, and I honestly believe that their whole new CTR scheme is broken and they are trying to keep the fact under wraps. I think this is going to greatly affect their revenues for Q4.

Then there is this whole "rumor" about them doing away with search engine arbitrage and forcing advertisers to link to their own urls. One estimate by a former eBay affiliate manager pegs Google's revenues from eBay affiliates at $20 million. That's just one large program, multiply that across all the merchants that affiliates are marketing and it spells a huge revenue drop for Google in Q1 if this is implemented as speculated.

So all in all, I would say my "Google Mood" is fairly bleak. But hey, at least I can look at my new radio when I'm feeling sour.

My New Years resolution is to spend more money with Overture.