Sponsorships account for 97% of my revenue right now. I send out a weekly newsletter, and in the first couple weeks I asked if anyone was interested in sponsoring the site. At least 4 or 5 companies have reached out to me since then.
I've also dabbled in Amazon affiliate links, but those don't seem to be quite worth it yet.
How do you evaluate what to charge the sponsors? My site http://thelogo.site showed up on the front page of HN and then ever since traffic has been growing. I have been just making money off of leads through the site asking for custom logos(on average about $2000 per month). But some people have enquired about sponsorship.
I am going down a similar route with my project RemoteBase.
But I am realizing that my scalability is limited because I can have only so many sponsors on the site. If there are too many sponsors at the same time, they start to lose value.
I think it might be worthwhile to diversify the revenue source from sponsorships in my case, and perhaps yours too.
Right, I've been concerned about the same thing. I can make roughly $1k/mo from every extra 100k pageviews/mo, and I have a lot of room for traffic growth, so I'm focusing on that right now. But eventually I'll hit a ceiling beyond which it's hard to grow traffic, and I'll have to find out what to do from there. Hopefully that won't be before I can pay my rent etc from the revenue!
I'm going to be writing about all my decision-making in a lot more detail on the blog pretty soon (https://IndieHackers.com/blog). Indie Hackers is all about transparency, after all.
RemoteBase is cool, btw! I'd love to feature you on Indie Hackers this week if you're interested.
I've also dabbled in Amazon affiliate links, but those don't seem to be quite worth it yet.