After you get, say, your first steady 1000 daily pageviews with your web-site, you become curious - is there a way to make some profit from it?

At least to return money paid for hosting, domain name etc.

If you have some experience in this - please share! If not - welcome to read about mine :)

results of survey about ads - people either hate them or block them

Approach tried - Ads from Google

So I started thinking about CodeAbbey - my hobby web-site with coding exercises - after about a year and half after its start.

I read about Google Adsense and after some efforts added small ad banner to top-right corner, shown on most of pages. I just didn't want to annoy my users with something larger. However even with this I found that:

• only about half pageviews load ads - obviously many people use ad-blockers!
• my users are of specific category - mostly techies and many of them studying - who don't pay much attention to ads at all
• some ads are quite inappropriate, silly or embarrassing, especially on mobile (so I switched them off on mobile);
• in total, return is small - in best times it generated about 10-15 bucks per month (with hosting currently about 13 per month);
• during last one or two years ads have become even more silly and their revenue dropped to about 7-8 per month.

That's just ain't no good! Of course Google Adsense proposes "to improve your revenue" by putting large (half-screen) ads on pages, but I feel it will look like "damned boolsheet" for our users. And we value our users more than few bucks, right? :)

Considering Donations

So currently I'm thinking about turning off ads at all and switching to donations. I previously had few occasional transfers from some kind people - notably one fellow affectionately sent me $100 after he have impressed his opponent while being interviewed for some developer job - by showing his profile at my site and explaining solution of some advanced tasks.

I've tried survey about people's feeling and it seems to be favorable:

However there seem to be several things to care about yet:

• seemingly I need "business"-type account at paypal - correct me if I'm wrong
• and as I'm going to send some small gifts (mugs, t-shirts) in case of too generous donations - it is important to get notified timely - and arrange some way of asking people for their postal address
• and obviously it is important to come up with some design for any gift postcards, mugs or t-shirts - and find out where to produce them and how to pack them.
• last but not least, I'm sure I'll need to figure out how to properly pay taxes according to our local laws (taxes from normal salary in our country are deducted automatically and we never need to care of this).

So I'm still working to this switch. If you have any advice - please share!