A recent online news article entitled “Five Reasons Why Ad Agencies Hate Search Engine Marketing” struck a responsive chord in the search engine marketing (SEM) community. Lots of posts, both critical and supportive, showed up in online forums. The article made some points that I have noted myself in previous articles. The most important ones are that good SEM is labor intensive and expensive, that profitability is hard to achieve, and that the search engine companies keep moving the goal posts.