To ad or not to ad?

[DomesticScience]

Hi, I've been blogging a while and until now haven't signed up for ads on my site. I'm with blogger and I've been thinking of signing up for their AdSense and I wondered what others thought of it? Did it clutter your blog and make it less readable? Was it worth the earnings? Is there a minimum hit rate (roughly) to make it viable?
Thanks in advance!
Helen

I tried it - it earned me about 8p over the course of 6 weeks and because I mentioned a Far Eastern country in one of my posts (I can't even remember in what context now), it posted up an ad for Thai brides

You have no control over the ads because they are keyword generated - I wouldn't really recommend it unless you're getting zillions of hits. You could try signing up with a UK ad agency like Glam Media or similar. I used to host ads for them (similar format but they are parent blog friendly) but they used flash/java which I'm personally not a massive fan of, hence me not hosting for them any more. But that's just my preference. I know loads of bloggers who are with Glam and their income probably paid their self-hosting fees each month which is a good off-set of the income.

I would also recommend you try Affiliate Futures. you're never going to get rich but the site is really simple, you have complete control and the ads look miles better than Google Adwords.

I hate that Wordpress put ads on my blog, I really hate it. But I'm too tight to pay for my own hosting so just have to accept it.

I have adsense but have never earnt a penny from it as I just dont have the hits required. and it clutters the blog. I might take it off.

Thanks everyone for the feedback. Think I'll leave them off, I chat about some odd thing so I think I'd like to avoid what ads may come up with!!!

DomesticScience, try BlogHer Ads as well.

You earn a decent amount depending on your monthly hit rate, but you have to go on a waiting list first.

I held out advertising for almost three years before I decided to take the plunge. I researched ad networks a lot before I decided on BlogHer.

It currently pays me my Flickr Pro membership :) That said, I am not a self hosted blog, so I have no hosting fees. When that changes, this will pay for the hosting fees as well.

We are thinking of going self hosted on Camel's Hump, so we have more control of the look of the site and can do things like host music files and so on, so were looking at hosting some adverts too, just to offset the hosting costs and give us a small budget for any expenses that might crop up.

Is it better to use one of the advert companies, or just to find advertisers that are willing to pay on a monthly basis ourselves? Our pageviews are steadily climbing, so hopefully we would be of interest to small advertisers, and we don't need to make a huge amount, just so that it actually stops costing me money to spend half my life arsing about with the site

I blog both on Blogger and a self-hosted wordpress site. My google ads haven't been great, but I get a cheque for about $60-80 every 3 months. I know it can be more, but I need to do so much more to get more views. I earn on my blogs in other ways (like writing sponsored posts sometimes). I don't think Adsense clutters up the blog. It depends on where you put it.
In terms of control, you can create a custom channel for your blog so you know what will be advertised there. I have a tutorial on 'how to create a custom channel for your blog'. You can say yes or no to certain advertisers and make sure that only targeted ads go on your blog.
I have articles on my blog about sites which will pay you to write sponsored posts. I also have a tutorial on how to create a custom channel. I don't want to put the links here because I don't want to be seen as a spammer. You can go on A Bloggers Books and look for the above (creating channel article) as well as '4 brilliant online sites to write for'. Let me know if you need more help.

I'm not an expert, though. Just know bits and pieces.