People nowadays will take a long look at a sponsored ad. Why? Well because the whole setup brings forth a feeling of confidence about the advertiser. People don’t ignore a text ad as easily as they do a graphical banner.
Another thing to note is that graphical banners have become even less profitable nowadays. It is because of this that many people are walking away from affiliate type networks to AdSense.
Of course, there are bad effects as well, with people making websites solely for the purpose of running AdSense on them and just as well, with a large phenomenon of ‘click fraud’, people creating artificial clicks for various reasons.
But Google does try to control such behavior, and really isn’t to be blamed for such individuals’ actions. All in all Google AdSense is transforming the way the Internet works and it’s doing so mostly in a good way.