The Google Adwords API has apparently begun to charge for calls and usage of their API this month. Ron Drabkin, a contributing editor at VentureBeat sums up the change in direction and what it means for start-ups in this space. Basically Google is saying that they don't want users to be able to manipulate the high converting, cheap costing long tail keywords that are little nuggets of gold for advertisers and arbitragers. I think this would obviously impact anyone using the API on behalf of a bunch of their long tail clients, particularly in local search. I don't know if this is what happened with TrueLocal.com but it seems to make sense to me, take a look at their Alexa plunge in the beginning of December right around when Google started charging for the API calls:
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