For advertising I agree Google is a safer option, but from a publishers point of view. Direct advertising is much much better. For one you keep all the profits for ad sales, meaning no cuts given out to already billion dollar companies aka Google. Google don’t even allow you the courtesy of telling you how much they take. Also you manage all your own ads and have complete editorial control over who advertises. With Adsense, you don’t.

But they still take a cut from you and don’t even let you know how much. They value their advertisers more than their publishers and can sometimes be unfair with click fraud without properly giving consideration to each individual case.

On the paid links front… I think ok it’s Google protecting their business. But to get a decent rank you need decent links and what not, I know they can be achieved naturally but still…
And as for confusing advertisements for PAID LINKS, ok technically they are. But it’s wrong, a visual advertisement for example is to aid general awareness and traffic, not rank. So they should find someway of assessing things more accurately.

Anyway, do you believe about google last issues related to “paid links”? Direct advertisers probably can be considered as paid links that will trigger google penalty. Whether it’s for your site or the advertisers sites.

I don’t want to say that we should put google as the god, but if it’s true, probably it’s google way to ‘protect’ their business.
“Adwords is the best advertising method since we don’t count it as paid links”. lol