@KGIII - Out of interest does the advertising revenue make much difference to a site such as this one, or your own site? Do people really click on the ad's?
It's a few bucks here and there. I actually made enough in ads that Google paid me. It wasn't enough to really cover the hosting, and the site will never make enough money to pay me for my time, but that's okay. If it covers the hosting I'll be happy.
People make six figures from ad revenue, but I can't speak about how much this forum makes in ad revenue. I click interesting ads now and again, just to help support the cause. Some folks are clearing five figures a month on ad revenue - but they have many sites and invest tons of time/money to get to that point.
I suspect that fewer ads are clicked on technical-oriented sites, 'cause more tech savvy users are more likely to block ads.
I've thought about putting up a nag popup when people block ads, but when I think about it I'm not sure if it'd do more harm than good. If folks want to block ads, it's fine - but it'd be pretty sweet if they whitelisted my site.
In my case, ad growth is slow but steady. I suspect that, sometime in the next six months or so it'll break even - or be really close, and the ads will cover the hosting. This assumes linear growth, which might be a bad idea as the site grew very rapidly but appears to have plateaued and is now growing a bit more slowly.
I might try the 'please whitelist my site' nag screen at some point - as it's easily dismissed and sets a cookie to only appear like every 30 days if you don't whitelist the site. Though for that feature it'd be easiest to buy a plugin that does the work. I'm also just tipping the point of having to pay for my CDN usage. I fit in the free tier still, but not by much. (I could use Cloudflare for free, I suppose.)