Everyone who needs to pay rent has ads in some form, and ads always suck:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/627097/how-to-tell-if-a-b...

Unless of course you're a bubble company building to flip before you're profitable, in which case you get to point fingers and laugh at the rest of us while we spend hours wrenching the last dollar out of our cash flow plans.

yes, but my opinion is that ad placement is doing more harm than good. for the site's audience, I think it's a safe assumption that they are fairly web-savvy and able to detect ads without too much effort. As a google adsense block, it's a cost-per-click ad. You see where i'm going with this... savvy users, poor ad placement = very few clicks = no revenue.

of course, that is all anecdotal... I'd be really interested to see real performance numbers on it.

'in tension' is one thing. 'in ugly contradiction to your message' is another.

mostly when users are not paying ones ;)