Google AdSense will not display any ads

I’ve been noticing a strange problem with my Google Adsense advertisements. Quite often, in fact just too often, Google would not serve any ads in the right sidebar of my homepage. There would be just this blank space staring at your face. What’s weird though is the fact that the ads would display properly on any of the content pages. No ads equals no money, so that was not acceptable.

Trying out different ad combinations and sizes I’ve noticed that the ads would suddenly start appearing when there was only one ad block per page (be it a homepage or a content page). Most of the time I had three and I’ve rarely seen all of them being displayed. Placing just one helped greatly. I’m thinking that maybe Google has some content to ads ratio system in place as that would at least partially explain this behavior. Nonetheless it’s working now (meaning that at least one ad block is displaying properly all of the time).

It’s a pity that Google does not want to make more money off me letting me decide how many ads to run ;)

UPDATE: Seems I’m not the only one.

Introducing Google AdSense

But, oh why?

Why do you blog?

I could not put it in better words. Hugh just put those words out of my mouth. We’ll see how it goes.

The funny thing is that I cannot see my own ads, because I’m using Firefox with the AdBlock extension. I have to run Internet Explorer just to see if they are there at all. Chances are some of you, just as me, will not see them at all. I can live with that, I guess.

There’s also some weird flicking problem with Firefox. I suppose it will have to be dealt with sooner or later…