It's a strong community of users, so I'm going to try the donation route soon, with bonuses for donators.
I tried having someone well connected in my industry directly sell advertising campaigns. They were able to increase ad revenue by about 30k per year. However, I needed to pay them, so at the end of the day it didn't have any benefit, and I went back to using ad networks.
Edit:
I run another site as well that has 5,000 daily unique users and 70,000 daily page views. It has two advertisements, one above the fold on the homepage, and one closer to the footer. It earns about $5 per day. That's it. I don't think many people understand how low earnings are for most sites.
Lots of publishers have been adding more advertisements, and trying to block users with ad block enabled, and it's not because they're greedy, money grabbers, trying to steal all of your information. Most of them are just trying to stay afloat as the ship sinks.
There is not enough money going to content online. How much do you donate to HN, Reddit, StackOverflow, and hundreds of other sites and services you use on a regular basis? I donate $0, and the majority of other people do the same. That's a problem, and we need a solution.
I personally really like when creators goes the patreon model where you as a creator pick a hard line at what salary is needed and then leave it up to the community to fulfill the requirement.
My best example of this is a very nice painted webcomic that updated once a month, and viewers reached his 4.5k goal so he could hire an additional person to help make it two comics a month. It makes the implicit contract between viewer and creator explicit, and readers would instantly know why and who to blame if the comic went back to only update once a month again.
That will increase the ratio of revenue-generating users to gratis users by reducing the overall number of users.
I recommend implementing a friction-free way for people to support your site, at whatever level they may feel comfortable with. Then you can occasionally remind readers that the continued quality of the site depends on you being able to pay for both it and your rent/mortgage.
Make a page that allows people to give you money via Patreon, Amazon Payments, PayPal, Bitcoin, Rixty, Venmo, and whatever else may be convenient for you. As the revenue from those sources allow, gradually remove the ads, and try to make it obvious that some ads went away because of increased direct patronage.
If you still want some ad revenue, you will probably need some way to do direct ad sales, and embed your paid endorsement into your content somehow, in a manner that is not off-putting to your audience, while also publicly disclosing that you were paid to promote something.
I tried having someone well connected in my industry directly sell advertising campaigns. They were able to increase ad revenue by about 30k per year. However, I needed to pay them, so at the end of the day it didn't have any benefit, and I went back to using ad networks.
Edit:
I run another site as well that has 5,000 daily unique users and 70,000 daily page views. It has two advertisements, one above the fold on the homepage, and one closer to the footer. It earns about $5 per day. That's it. I don't think many people understand how low earnings are for most sites.
Lots of publishers have been adding more advertisements, and trying to block users with ad block enabled, and it's not because they're greedy, money grabbers, trying to steal all of your information. Most of them are just trying to stay afloat as the ship sinks.
There is not enough money going to content online. How much do you donate to HN, Reddit, StackOverflow, and hundreds of other sites and services you use on a regular basis? I donate $0, and the majority of other people do the same. That's a problem, and we need a solution.