interesting thread.
Just a comment tough, it's quite obvious that (for a well known site) you make more money by doing direct sales rather than with adsense. However, ad sales force also costs money (
I mean, my job is to have my forum online, not to be a salesman - I hate this, and I don't give a fsck if I lose money because of that).
Google takes 50% share (nobody knows for sure but that's my gut feeling) and that's about what any decent salesforce will cost you as well. At the end of the day, adsense is not so bad.
The other problem is that many ADVERTISERS have a
mix-media approach ; they give money to you
AND to adsense
AND to facebook (etc)
all at the same time, and they compare results. I don't know a single advertiser, in 2010, that does not look into the CPC of an ad campaign, even if it is sold CPM because, well, "you sell CPM".
Your "expensive CPM" ads actually have to click more than google, otherwise you're simply doing "junk sales" and nobody will come back ever again.
Again, you are in direct contact with the customer, you have a limited number of customers, you have to keep them happy. Keeping them happy means
outperforming Adsense : good luck with that. Because you'll produce less clicks (that's a fact) so your site will look "small" in their mix media. And those clicks you got for them ; they'd better be cheap !
So this whole idea of "replacing adsense with something you do yourself" is not as simple as it seems. We don't live in "CPM wonderland" anymore. When I started selling ads, $30CPM was mainstream. It makes people laugh today.
A) You have to sell roughly at the same price as google or advertisers will simply laugh at you (especially as many forums DO KEEP their adsense adspaces even when selling direct CPM - your advertisers are not idiots and will notice that they can be on your site "for cheap" thru the adsense backdoor.)
B) The share adsense takes is not really much than what it would cost you to do the same job (either in time or by hiring a sales dude). Furthermore, google takes the customer problems, not you. This is invaluable to me.
I could comment on the 10 other bullet points but that would take an entire day
Just a quick word on "website rebranding" and stuff like that ; again, if the customer wants a visual impact, it's called branding. They want that people remember the name, the logo, etc.
Only major accounts do care about branding nowadays - local stores or smaller customers don't give a d*mn : they want clicks, ROI, leads, CPA, whatever. They don't know the acronyms, but that's what they want

Or, again, you're doing junksales and move from one angry customer to another.