Advertising on blogs and personal websites is tricky. On the one hand, running a site isn't always cheap (both in terms of hours and capital), and a small income is very welcome. On the other hand, in a perfect world the ads would be unnecessary. In my case, I've tried a variety of advertising models to support the site, and the previous one has served me well for the last year.

Text Link Ads have been, and continue to be, extremely effective for advertisers and provide a decent stream of revenue. They're also not too intrusive. I'm happy with how those are running. AdSense, however, has not really performed well enough to justify the placement of 3 ads on the page (my own fault entirely - my advert placement and styling, I think, has been all wrong).

With that in mind, I have changed the style and placement of the AdSense advertising on the site. It is (currently) a single block advert above the fold. I plan to experiment with this and test different styles over the coming weeks and months, and will let you know how it turns out. My hunch at this stage is that the block approach is probably going to provide the highest clickthrough rates, but I don't know whether or not it will also prove to be the most intrusive and inflexible of the formats.
 

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