There was really good money in this for quite a while, and in fact, PPC arbitrage is how I got my start in affiliate marketing. There have been several ebooks written about this. This is also why when you do a search for “university of phoenix” for example, you see dozens of ads going straight to the university of phoenix website.
I think Google will automate this process as much as possible. That’s been their preferred method of dealing with just about everything for a long time. DMOZ’s motto is “Humans do it better”. Google’s motto seems to be just the opposite: “Artificial intelligence does it better”.
This is still just hearsay at this point, from what I understand. I haven’t seen any official announcement from Google on this yet, although the rumor is that the change will take place in January.