I get virtually nothing from adsense and have never considered it to be a good source of income. I'm currently re-designing many aspects of my sites so I can move from adsense to direct advertising via a paying customer.

Excellent solution Ken,
I found direct advert on my site much more lucrative than adsense ad from the time adsense started. I only place it on non premium sites where I do not know what advert to sell or have time to market properly.

I think alot of people are becoming used to it and tuning the ads out like banner ads.

aside from adsense are there any programs that can compete with adesense and that pays a little higher?

I belive Yahoo has a similar program but only available in US. there is also adbright http://www.adbrite.com/mb/about_us.php
and Adster http://www.adster.com/buy/panel.php?panel_id=10678
good luck

There are alternatives to adsense.
There are programs which will create ads formatted with the same appearance as adsence, but you create them yourself, and add your own affiliate links.
Creating a flow of traffic is a big job. It just seems to me that relying solely on adsense never was a good idea.

myfunzrlor,
I completely agree with you, generating revenue the way you described is more lucrative than adsense, I think webmasters just do not realise the potential of creating affiliate links and earning larger income than they will do from adsense

i also noticed that on my adsense. income is going down. :-|

Downwards has been the general trend of income from adsense for most people, webmasters were hopeful when Yahoo launched their version that it will be a competition for adsense so that webmasters get better deal but that has not been the case so far