I have done the same on quite a few of my sites. I think it puts a message out also that 'I am not greedy and I do have a genuine interest in the subject'

Also you are right, it can look tidier

decided on the same thing from day 1, and i'm happy with it.

However I don't have any full info on my homepage, mainly teasers and summaries with links to full articles located on pages with adsense

Same here. I don't want people come to my home page and leave. That's not why I am in my business.

Also the home pages are usually broad in theme and how does one target? Which category to target? So I removed it from the home page.

What to do in the home, don't know yet.

If I lost 20% of my income I'd have a cow man, so it must not be that much money involved.

Here's an idea, pull it from the rest of the pages too!

Leave more for the rest of us ;)

I've thought about doing the same on some of my sites - but I was thinking I would leave a link unit there.

I don't run ads on any of my front pages. Targetting would be sucky anyway (my sites host a broad range of content), but mostly I just don't like the look.

Same here from day one, when not booked by advertisers, the only way AdSense can have a foothold on my frontpage would be by having more image ad inventory.

incrediBILL - I phrased that badly in the initial post - my total adsense earnings make up 20% of what the site yields, the point being that I make alot more money through direct relationships with advertisers -

I've tried it both ways. At the moment I'm not using AdSense on my home page for several reasons:

1) AdSense was serving some really off-topic ads for a while, and it just looked bad to have ads for San Diego or Hong Kong hotels on the home page of a European travel site.

2) Display ads are an increasingly important part of my revenue mix, and since the home page is the first page that prospective advertisers look at, I'd rather have them notice the display ads rather than the AdSense leaderboard.

3) When the press and publicists for tourist offices and travel vendors come calling, having a home page without an AdSense leaderboard might make a better impression. (I say "might"--it probably isn't that important in most cases, but you never know.)

I was debating removing Adsense from the front page of one of my sites as well. However, having set up some page specific tracking on it for the last two months, it turns out it's getting a fairly respectable CTR - only about 50% of the site average CTR, but that average is hauled up a long way by some very high-performance pages. So it stays for now - I could pull it without any major loss, but unless it begins to display very badly targetted ads, it's doing more good than harm.