europeforvisitors - 6:44 pm on Jan 2, 2008 (gmt 0)

Managed to get #1 rankings for some things, so traffic tripled this year. Unfortunately, CTR stank compared to last year, most likely because of removing the little pics next to the ads. So, I ended up making almost exactly the same amount of money as 2006, with triple the traffic.

I wonder if source of traffic is a factor in Google's compensation algorithm? That wouldn't be unreasonable. From Google's point of view, a site that got most of its page views from Google referrals might not be as contributing as much "added value" as a site that generated a significant percentage of page views internally. (This may not be relevant to your case, but it's something that could affect publishers whose business strategies are driven by SEO.)