More visitors, better stats, more money, higher search engine rankings
Since I changed my blog, removed all widgets and removed most ads my blog has grown tremendously. My rankings has gone up and I make more money. My site gets more visitors and I rank much higher on search engines. I also have begun to not turn urls into clickable links and that has also turned out to be a great boost for my blog. This might sound a bit selfish but if you want your blog to rate higher you have to remove those widgets and stats. Having a blog with hundreds of inbound links and the only links out is when people comment, which point to their sites makes my site much better.
