Text ads is a brilliant idea. Definitely post those too!
It's funny, I don't think of banner ads at the top of a page as abnormal at all. Just about every site I go to has one there, and most ad agencies will not let you put a banner ad up if it's below that top fold. So they can't be placed lower ... I do agree that the trick has to be *as few ads* as possible, but those ads should be well placed and very targeted. If you have lots of bad ads you annoy users, but if you have just 3 or 4 perfect ads, spaced far from each other, your users actually think of them as resources.
