My visitors were usually smart and probably figured out on their own (since many of them had blogs - and AdSense accounts - themselves) that clicking on banners meant supporting the site.
Too bad Google shoots first and never asks any question.
It's really comfortable to live in a space without meaningful competition.
If I were an advertiser, why would I want to advertise on your site, if I know that visitors are supporting you by clicking but have no intention of converting? I care about the effectiveness of my ads. They are far less effective if visitors do this.
Ultimately the advertisers are paying for your AdSense income. It may not be your fault, but if you're providing less value to the advertiser, then it seems only fair that you don't participate, since your participation harms the whole market.
This is undeniably a problem with the current AdSense business model, but we all know this, choose to participate and accept the risk.
It would be wonderful if advertisers could pipe conversion rates back into Google so that ads would gravitate towards sites that generated greater conversion rates. This way, sites that have fans that decrease conversion rates will naturally sink to the bottom of the pile without much effort and would bubble up as soon as the behavior changes and conversion rates improve.
It seems a natural solution to the problem. Would you be able to pipe back conversion rates based on where the banner was shown?
That's pretty easy to do if they're using Google Analytics. It integrates with AdWords very well, and can track conversion rates (not just clicks) on their site for each ad.
Heck. If this data would be piped back to me, I would be able to target content towards whatever brought higher conversions and thus higher value for advertisers.
Too bad Google shoots first and never asks any question.
It's really comfortable to live in a space without meaningful competition.