netmeg - 4:01 pm on Sep 7, 2010 (gmt 0)

I'm pretty sure the messages you see in your account are auto generated. If AdSense wants to talk to you personally, they send you email. At least, that's what they did for me. The messages I see in my account and those of my clients who have accounts are all the same, all show up at the same time, and all predictably generic.

Now, all that aside - I have gone back and forth on image ads over the years. This year I devised a sort of test which, although probably faulty, at least gave me some feel for how they'd do during my peak traffic. I created an ad block that was text only, and another one that was image only, and I used PHP to rotate 'em evenly. After a million pageviews or so, the image ads turned out to have a much higher CTR and EPC. So they stay on for me.

Even though that damn giant glazed donut is still following me around, even on my own sites. Every time I am tempted to block image ads to get rid of it, I have to remind myself how well they're paying now.