Why ads on this dinky little blog? While I acknowledge that they suck, in a way, for the reader, the ads do a few things that make them interesting for me: (1) At the other place, they actually brought in a little money (although a couple of orders of magnitude less then some experts would have predicted considering the readership). (2) It’s interesting to see what sort of ads Google serves up, and how it’s influenced by what’s been on the site recently. (3) It makes this technically a business, which might possibly allow me to write things off on my taxes, though I’ll have to research that a little more between now and next April. (4) It’s another way of measuring; e.g., at aforementioned Other Place, readership was growing long after ad revenue plateaued, and while I never figured out why that was, the puzzle was nagging in a good way.
In any case, it’s an experiment. If it goes nowhere, the ads will disappear just as quickly as they came, and you’ll probably be subjected to another navel-gazing post like this one. Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure that if you want to advertise specifically on this site (rather then just target search terms), you can do exactly that through Google Adwords.