I was blocked by adsense just before i withdraw my first $700, so i don't use it anymore.
then you were not playing by the rules and no wonder you got banned

Now as the the article itself lol at the commenting, now i got to a point where i was pulling few k a month just from adsence and i was in a good ranking position and so if you align everything right and make a nice site that works and people like and your ads are in good positions and not overbearing then you will find a good return. but the entire site needs to work because once people find stuff they don't want google will know and mark it as a negative point.
the more positive points with google the better your chances are going to be of making money. But after 2 years i am like screw adsence, adblocks are old school and outdated unless your getting private paid ads which are impossible to get without major traffic which is everyone's biggest problem. no one has enough of it...
it is fun to start off with but i feel that after you get back a script kiddie stage you should evolve your work along with your skills and take it to the next level, if i sell 1 product on my retail site that would = on average 100-400 clicks at 30c each/ avg $30-50 on most products. Now really how much traffic would it take to get your 500 clicks every day keep in mind that you have to build it, write your content keep it updated and the whole 10 yards to keep it up there in the listings.
After a lot of time wasted and starting to move up to better things, one thing i can agree on is 0 ads will give the better impression as really instead of having a junk everywhere and content everywhere which is all ways good on a boring friday night. But what if you had 1000 ads on the site and each product is an ad. If you add the same time and effort in your marketing building the business my personal opinion is that your going to make more money.
also my personal opinion is that, the dream is to make bank.... make some coin.....why deal with drips and drops when you can take the whole bottle with a little more work. provide a service, sell digital content. IOS app selling is one of the biggest money makers out there as some games have made over 10 million USD. better yet, take minecraft for example on a gaming level. Such a simple idea that we have been doing for the last 20-30 years playing with logo and now we have a digital version to make blocks till the mouse finger is sore.
I would love to see anyone here prove me wrong in that adsence is a joke to make real money and the only way to do it is to have millions of visitors which takes years to make. Ozzu has been around from when i was in early high school and today it still stands the king of web master sites with god only knows how many visitors that run past here. BWM would not sell this for anything as it is worth more then gold itself with the base standing it has.
As i finish my novel at this early hour with the sun coming up, think outside the box

it is what take things to the next level.