Just curious: on the second one, serving ads doesn't bring in much income, and it might even drive people away. Have you considered removing them? If so, what was the result?
The percentage is so low because it's not shown on much of the site. Paying subscribers don't ever see ads. It only shows for the free account and for some long tail SEO pages we have. We probably should remove them and just put up-sell copy there though...
Tribal fusion is good if you have a lot of page views but few clicks(they just do CPM ads, but are pretty much top dog in the space, so they can get better rates), but you need a lot of traffic to get in.
You need about 5K uniques per day to get in, although that number varies by category...for example I hear that if you have a game website, you'll need 20K uniques per day to get in.
I just needed CPM since I get a lot of page views per user, average is only ~6 pages, but that number is distorted by all the one page wonders from when the site hits some social network. The actual users who come to the site from niche specific sources, do about 20 pages per hit.
However, my site is not a web application or anything. It is just an encyclopedia on purely all things open source gaming, and the only one in the universe. As a result, I doubt there are many ways to monentize the traffic.
It gave me nice money to booststrap my game development site, although I still need to make it "real serious as in not-just-for-fun" startup firm.
We're the platform provider in a two-sided genealogy market (genealogy document clients on one side, genealogy lookup providers on the other.) We take a commission from providers (15% of their selling price) and a processing charge from clients (10% of the provider's selling price.)
