Sure, if you plan on staying small and never growing, this is fine. But you can't build your site for growth staring at the edge of an $4-8/CPM marginal cost (in addition to all your other overhead!).
$4-8/CPM is far more than most ad networks pay. Perhaps Google is deliberately trying to get rid of most major GMaps users. If they follow through on this, they will be successful.
The price I was quoted was actually $17k/year for 250,000 impressions. We asked for clarification, and the salesperson said yes, you only get 250,000 impressions a year.
That's $68 cpm.
With some pushback they increased it to 1M impressions a year, but it's still a bit ridiculous.
$4-8/CPM is far more than most ad networks pay. Perhaps Google is deliberately trying to get rid of most major GMaps users. If they follow through on this, they will be successful.