Bill Hobbs is a Tennessee-based political blogger who’s relatively happy with Google AdSense, despite the poor targeting of ads:

I have the AdSense service running on HobbsOnline and I don’t mind the off-target ads. In fact I find them kind of funny in that an informal online poll of my readers last year found that about 85 percent of them supported the re-election of President Bush. AdSense won’t generate much revenue. It took me eight months to accumulate the first $100 in revenue and it’s going to take three months to accumulate the next $100. Not huge, but not horrible either.

I just sent Bill an e-mail in response to his post. Here’s an excerpt:

While it is true that I was frustrated by the insulting nature of the mistargeted Google ads, there certainly was a humorous aspect as well. Although, had the election not gone the way I wanted, I suspect that my ability to see the humor in it might be a little dampened.

My real gripe with the ad mistargeting was knowing that it would cost me revenue. If I’m going to whore out the side margins of my site, I might as well maximize the revenue. (Why be a street-corner hooker when you can be a high-priced call-girl?) Serving up ads that are irrelevant for large portions of my site’s audience means that they will be generating far less revenue than if the ads were targeted properly. So, if I’m going to sell space that ends up insulting my audience AND the selling of that space isn’t resulting in the income that it could/should, then it doesn’t seem worth it to me.

Bill also mentions an ad service called BlogMatch Network that might be worth checking out. I tried signing up for BlogAds several days ago, but have not yet heard back from them. Not an auspicious start.