The ingenuity of this advertisement struck me:
Now if you're not a
StackOverflow user you won't necessarily get why this is such a well thought-out advertisement but this is exactly why I think sites should take advertisement management into their own hands.
Allowing your advertisers to publish advertisements that have actually been considerate of the target site's audience is a great plus in my opinion. I have a suspicion that this is why Jeff and Joel went with the text or images approach in the first place.
There aren't enough text-based advertisement services around these days. And why not? Images, flash animations and JavaScript based advertisements might be easy and quick enough to import into your site but they're damn easy for Adblock users to get rid of as well. Besides, over time I think I've adjusted myself to phase out the advertisements. I know that the right hand column (and anything highlighted in orange) on a Google search probably isn't worth my time (unless I really can buy Google on eBay).
Plain text advertisements are non-intrusive, tricky to remove (if you're really that obsessed with depriving a site of income) and allow a lot of customisability for the publisher. It's also not hard to build such a system for your website: a rotating series of items, a database query and a counter is all it takes.
