It's not my section of the Internet most of the time, but I'm professionally obligated to know a little about it, so in case anyone here runs a massive consumer

It's not my section of the Internet most of the time, but I'm professionally obligated to know a little about it, so in case anyone here runs a massive consumer Internet property and can't make the bills with AdSense: you should strongly consider having a direct ads sales force. AdSense is very effective at fulfilling the role it was designed for, which is algorithmically filling your least valuable advertising slots. It is not good at getting top dollar for brand advertising, in fact, it is optimized in entirely the other direction. Brand advertisers sneeze out numbers which pay for the entire salary bill in a month. This is particularly true if you have an anomalously strong community or an audience which is more valuable than "a generic Internet user in your company." Even if you're not a massive B2C company, there are plenty of niche publishers who quietly receive $500 to $X,000 a month for each of ~6 ad placements rather than taking $125 in "webmaster welfare" from Google. At that level you don't even need a sales force -- just "your ad could be here" leading to a contact page works.