Here on ultramookie.com, I run ads from the Yahoo! Publisher Network. It works out OK, I guess. I don't get all that much money -- but, I also don't get all that many visitors. Oh well. But, in an environment like a blog, text ads work out great. They get targetted towards whatever I have written about. For instance, if I post about the Xbox 360, then Xbox 360 related stuff show up. If I post about my Motorola RAZR V3, then mobile phone ads come up. That's pretty much it. While I was exploring website monitoring services, I found where text ads just don't work. I found a place, Host Tracker that monitors websites. That's all they do. Apparently, they make money from ads and also selling SMS credits -- so that if your site goes down, you can get an SMS telling you so. The problem I see is that the ads from Google that they run are for other website monitoring services! Basically, they have splattered their page with competitors' advertising! That's the non-brilliance of targetted advertising when it comes to running it on a service site. I see this as a problem for many service sites who think that it would be a great source of extra income to run contextual text ads on their sites. They end up putting advertisements from competitors on their own sites -- and most likely don't know about it or are too stupid to realize it. Contextual text ads work great on general news sites because of the variety of words that are on the pages where the context is being determined from. But, when you run a service site that has only specific words that describe the service that you provide, then that is definitely a place where text ads don't work.