We haven't monetized hackernoon.com at all and have instead focused on good content and we are now well into the millions of monthly uniques. Its not worth the time to monitize 3k visitors
I'm half with you. I think monetising 3k people on a generic chat site is going to be hard/impossible (what interests one may not interest the other). That said, monetising 3k people in a micro niche could potentially be absolutely worth it. For instance, if the 3k are chatting about poker - you may only need to convert a handful a month with the right offer to make it a nice bit of extra (semi) passive income.