So a certain website of mine has been going strong for a couple of years now, attracting roughly 125,000 impressions a month, 6000 unique viewers, month after month and growing.

As you guess, it's a niche site, with very fastidious people, which really is a great market, these people are passionate about what they are into, and very active in their scene, so, i tried out a few different methods to monetize the site (primary reason to offset the cost of the virtualmachine i rent thats dedicated to it, and a pipe dream is to be able to make it pay for a little bit of travel to enjoy what it is that the site aims to promote and contribute to)

Initial goal make $30USD/month to pay for the hosting, $1USD from every 4000 impressions

Google Adsense

About a 2% CTR, which was pretty standard, problem is the ads payed VERY low, and were of very poor content that in my opinion insulted my community, (ads for designer products, when the site is about people who are just into collecting things of a certain era for example), as well as the usual "loose weight now!" type ads, why would you bother? it never made enough cash to cover the hosting for the month

• Poor quality of ads
• Low click thru rate
• Low ad payments
• Ads may dilute the community's strength and edge

Update Also I found that the big 250x250 or so "image ads" did not pay any more than the smaller 200x90 text advertisements, in most cases, i found the text advertisements to pay more, and have a greater variety in their cost-per-click than image ads, and they dont take up as much valuable realestate on your site!

Amazon Affiliate Product Marketing

Well this looked promising, atleast then i could choose what advertisements i wanted to run on the site, include links to products that i chose that are relevant to my community AND make money (around 6%) from the price, so if i had a link to a book that sold $40, thats not bad! right? no..

• First you have the CTR for the ad on your site, lets say 5%, then you have the actual % of people that would buy that from amazon that clicked on your ad, so that might be say, 1 in 20, so thats, 1/20th of 5% or 0.0025% purchase rate, which is a lot crapper than running ads

Check these stats.. this is my site's stats from running the ads, 0.3% CTR for the initial advertisement from my site to amazon, and then not even a single purchase (out of 50!) of the said book on amazon

Views	Clicks	Click-thru
Last month	16605	50	0.30%
This year	16605	50	0.30%
All time	16605	50	0.30%

Niche based advertising networks

So I approached a couple of niche based market networks who promised CPM (cost per mile or cost per 1000 impressions) of around $2 to $4USD, the