I have removed the advertisements from this blog. Not because I worried about people not liking them (they were fairly unobtrusive). Not because they were slowing down the page load times (although they did, a bit). Not even because I felt that they were somehow impinging upon my editorial independence.
No, I removed them because they weren’t generating any income. Not a single cent! I pretty much expected any income to be tiny, and certainly not enough to cover my fairly minor running expenses. It wasn’t tiny, it was totally absent. Experiment over.
I have found that click through adds are difficult to generate, well, anything. Sites that have used them successfully work at it, placing them in prominent, but unintrusive locations. I haven’t had any success with them either and I don’t have the time to plan strategies or organize them in any way.
I find that many are ad-blind. I for one am. Many also uses add-ons that removes the ads while browsing. Another factor is that if anyone comes to your site and you have content they are interested in they are less inclined to click on ads even if the ads are related to the context.