One reason to justify Google's cut is that on an advertising deal where the Advertiser gets billed for each click (CPC) on his link on someone else website, having a reliable third party to count the clicks is very important.
Click fraud is what makes Tier 2 CPC networks really risky for advertisers even if CPC are much lower than Tier 1 (Adwords, Bing).
Regarding your Adsense example, was there not a mention like "Ads by Google," "Sponsored Links," or the AdChoices icon ? In that case, it makes clear that it's not a natural link.
You own a website, I own a website. I pay you $100 to show your visitors a link to my website. The link is presented as an organic, non paid link.
=BAD
You own a website, I own a website. I pay you $100 to show your visitors a link to my website. The link is presented as a paid link, with a no follow attribute.
=GOOD
On a side note, your breakdown of the Ad Revenue using Google as a middleman is wrong.
If you pay Google 100$ (via Adwords) to decide to show ad on my site, I will get 68% of that 100$ and Google will get 32%
A good way to avoid articles on those big companies is to start reading "region specific" startup blogs or "topic specific" startup blogs.
Some of the blogs I follow:
I use http://ihackernews.com/ on my mobile. The only issue is that sometimes comments are not displayed because the app reach the api requests limit.
Any similar issue with your app ?
It doesn't look like anyone knew...
"Alcatel-Lucent's corporate representative, at the heart of its massive licensing campaign, couldn't even name the technology or the patents it was suing Newegg over."