I appreciate your sharing what you’re hearing, James. I’m also not very familiar with AdSense (not a publisher or advertiser myself). If you have other revenue options beyond AdSense and are finding you’re not getting any results from AdSense, then why wouldn’t you abandon the system and try something else? Hope you find a good fit for your new sites as they launch. :)

I don’t know all that much about ad sense but I see allot of complaints from people with websites in developing countries like India that complain they barely get anything off sites running ad sense even when they are pulling 20,000 unique visitors a day and it might get a couple of dollars for them, and hearing about websites in much richer countries hitting 30 to 50 dollars a click.

Ad Sense better fix that one up or I can guarantee you that small niche affiliate marketing will be getting the ad space. It may not have the consistency of Ad Sense but if your 10 to 20 thousand visitors a day is going to make you 2 or 3 dollars, where do you think they will go?

I don’t even pull the traffic to bother with ads at all and am just working on building up the sites, but from the feed back I am getting, Ad Sense is not looking like it will be my first choice.

Since my sites will be directed at bloggers of all niches, tools for bloggers like WordPress, SEO, Pluggins, Themes, paid traffic generation is currently making a whole lot more sense then a company that wants to control my site, has strict policies and pays in dimes and quarters unless your very specialized to what they want.