Anyone truly concerned about this subject should make use of Google to answer the question for their own situation–via Analytics. If you’re currently running AdSense ads across your site, pick two comparable pages that aren’t performing as well as you’d like in search, use one as a control with no changes, and modify the other by reducing the number of paid links above the fold (or on the entire page). Wait 3 – 6 months and see if there are measurable changes in: search ranking and AdSense performance.

Of course, will the answer for that page remain true for the rest of your site?

To make revenue of course. It’s all about your goals, if your goal is to provide the very best customer experience, go for it. But for most of us we live in a world that has bills, and those bills need to be paid.

Don’t be worried about everything Google tells you, I was at Pubcon myself. Google said scraped content doesn’t rank, and it does, they say paid links don’t work, and they do, and they say Adsense hurts you, but it doesn’t.