I've earned a grand total of $0.06 from Google's Adsense. I hypothesize that optimal ad placement is highly correlated with fooling site users into thinking that the information at the other end of an ad link is supremely relavent first party information instead of a third party ad. Clicking ads may cause an unpleasant and confusing internet experience to internet neophytes. Additionally, I hypothesize that many users who may visit this site use Firefox with Adblock, and thus have all ads disabled. Neither of these hypotheses have been tested.
Sometimes, I just click the links that appear at the top of Google's search results because the non-ad link may be further down the page. I'm not fooled into thinking the ad is a search result, but it's easier to click a link that's at the top of a search results list than to scan through the items in the list looking for the non-ad link corresponding to the desired website.
So, on to a tangential topic.
What happens when Firefox gets more widespread, and more people use Adblock? Will the internet as we know it cease to exist? Google seems to be diversifying already -- getting widespread first, and then figuring out how to monetize their ubiquity. Perhaps they'll be able to keep their revenue up without relying on tricky ads.
