Built the site back in February and got my first direct advertiser in July.
I've learned that these things unfortunately take time. Trust needs to be built, traffic needs to happen, and companies are sometimes understandably reluctant to shell out a bunch of money for some ad on a website they don't really know anything about.
But if you can provide actual traffic for them, they'll pay for it.
Congrats on your success, but getting to >$1K/mo. in under five months seems incredibly fast, especially for something that requires such little maintenance.
Can you expand a little on your expectations? Maybe provide some more context?
It seems like a lot of developers let their projects tread water unless they see extraordinary profits in extremely short time frames. Maybe there was a large up-front investment?
I'm guessing that there are a lot of these projects sitting around; does anyone know of a marketplace to partner or buy/sell these types of businesses? The ones I'm familiar with (flippa, sitepoint) don't generally cater to projects with existing cashflows.
I've learned that these things unfortunately take time. Trust needs to be built, traffic needs to happen, and companies are sometimes understandably reluctant to shell out a bunch of money for some ad on a website they don't really know anything about.
But if you can provide actual traffic for them, they'll pay for it.