I never see them because I run Adblock in Firefox and PithHelmet in Safari, but I do actually use Adsense on my blog. I don’t make any money off of it (really, I’ve earned like fifteen cents this year, which means I’ve taken home $0), but I wanted to try it out so that I’d have first-hand experience with the service.
Since the ad revenue (*laugh*) doesn’t do anything to help operating costs, I’ve thought many times of taking them off; And this latest Adsense update just about made me pull the trigger. From the November Adsense updates comes this feature: “Gain new advertisers directly from your webpages.” The idea is pretty slick — the service allows an advertiser to directly buy AdWords advertising space on sites they’d like exposure on. Such purchases then pay a premium to the site owner. However, even though I allow dynamic adwords, I’m not interested in allowing direct advertising sales on my blog for ads I don’t get to approve. So, here’s the important bit:
“If you’d prefer not to participate in Onsite Advertiser Sign-up, you can opt out before it starts by visiting the My Account tab.”
Yeah… I’m a freak like that. I’m out.