
Ask HN: Has anyone successfully relied on advertising for revenue? - _davebennett
It seems like advertising might be the worst business model to have in 2019. Any success stories?
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sharmi
If you do not get approved by adsense, it is not an viable option.

I have a site with views in the millions, but no adsense. Adding any other ad
delivery service creates a lot of spam and makes the website yuck. And the
payout is orders of magnitude less than adsense. So i have just foregone ads
and host on my own cost.

Getting into Adsense is becoming difficult and there are lots of horror
stories of them randomly suspending accounts without payouts.

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mkbkn
Have you tried venturing into affiliate marketing?

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sharmi
Unfortunately, my site is more like a dictionary and it does not lend itself
much to affiliate marketing.

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stevesearer
Office Snapshots ([https://officesnapshots.com](https://officesnapshots.com))
here.

We switched away from ad networks ~5 years ago in favor of selling and hosting
our own ads which are static jpg/pngs.

Our ads are matched against the content (office furniture ads on office design
content) which still targets the reader in a roundabout way in that they will
likely be interested in the ads if they are interested in the content.

There are several benefits including faster site, keeping 100% of the revenue,
and getting to control the quality of ads to ensure a great experience for our
readers.

We have also been removing 3rd party scripts (share buttons, etc) over the
last year or so and only have Google Analytics and a Google Font left. The
site still works if you block them.

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sgillen
Maybe I’m confused by your question. I believe Google and Facebook rely on ads
for most of their revenue.

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avichalp
I believe OP is talking about relying on ad for monetizing your content.

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return1
From my experience, eCPMs have not gone down in the past 10 years, at least
for adsense . Which means that ads are not a worse monetization than it was in
the past if that's what you are asking.

