Google Ads: Should blogs have them or not?

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Lorelle VanFossen posts an interesting question, If I Had Ads Here, Would You Click Them?, this is very much an issue that IB has been struggling with as well.

Hosting Google Ads: Would you?
The more observant of you will have noticed that I did run Google Ads on this blog for quite a while, but in the end I have removed them. I actually liked them quite a lot because I felt that they added a certain legitimacy to my blog for a while, but then I read over the TOS from Google, and felt that they were too limiting for me:

* revenue is uncertain;
* ad quality isn’t always suitable;
* too many limits on what can be done;
* a click through rate on my blog that just was awful;
* I’d prefer not to have fraudulent click issues;
* I couldn’t use Blogmad or BlogExplosion to promote my blog (though many others do so, in contravention of Google’s TOS).
So, for the meantime, I have decided to remove ALL Google Ads from this blog. You may still see them by accident! Do let me know. Perhaps for other kinds of websites, I would still use them; in fact, on some of my other non-blog sites, I have actually retained the Google Ads. It’s just that I don’t find them effective on blogs. Any ideas why?…

Clicking on Google Ads: Would you?
I don’t have a problem clicking on Google Ads when I see them. I usually do that because I see something that catches my attention. I have an instant preference for ads that are relevant to the content I have been just reading. But I can’t stand some of the particular ads that occur from time to time. The big bugbear I have is ads like those here where the ads are wedged right up against the text. The other kind of ad that I hate is the Flash ads where the ads flash all the way; in fact they are so distracting that I have to navigate away from the page. In fact, I recently installed an ad blocking tool for FF2.0 only to get around those awful ads.

Hope this answers Lorelle’s question! Any comments?

Further Reading:

A Review of My First Year of Blogging provides some good follow up reading on Adsense on your blog. And a further article here quotes:

The more realistic conclusions here is that AdSense for bloggers sucks, the click-through rates are too low, the advertising is not relevant enough and readers of blogs are more accustomed to blocking-out the ads – all this results in a very low CPM rate.