This site is a great one to look at in terms of the ad ecosystem. The ads are (typically) not that bad and very targeted, and the content is fantastic to the sub-genre of people looking at it. The admin there uses, reviews, and runs give-aways for products he actually likes and wants to advocate for. True, the site is never going to make billions or even millioons, but it is enough for his needs.
The issue is that it takes a lot of work to build that with your community and ad partners. You have to make a lot of phone calls and write a lot of emails. You have to have consistently good and timely articles. Your content and audience have to be managed. Big ad firms do not have the margins to do this and are forced into blast ads.
Many other commenters here mention that the ad ecosystem is up for a change, much like pop-ups a decade ago. Perhaps a more curated environment is going to appear for a little while.
So, just for example, loading artofmanliness.com allows 14 different third-party companies to track your browsing history. There's more to fixing this than just putting in work to manage ad inventory -- we need a system that doesn't depend on broadcasting private information to dozens of anonymous companies.
People subscribe to podcasts. Why couldn't people subscribe to his site (for a trivially small payment) and get access to one new article per week? (Or access to 50 articles for a set period of time.)
If the content is good, then people will be willing to pay for it. That's how books work. That's how, for example, wikipedia works. That's how newspapers work (although of course many have been failing).
I'm not saying the site is perfect, rather, a more appropriate use of ads and how they are displayed. This is to counter the auto-playing pop-ups you can never seem to exit from and only mis-click on.
This site is a great one to look at in terms of the ad ecosystem. The ads are (typically) not that bad and very targeted, and the content is fantastic to the sub-genre of people looking at it. The admin there uses, reviews, and runs give-aways for products he actually likes and wants to advocate for. True, the site is never going to make billions or even millioons, but it is enough for his needs.
The issue is that it takes a lot of work to build that with your community and ad partners. You have to make a lot of phone calls and write a lot of emails. You have to have consistently good and timely articles. Your content and audience have to be managed. Big ad firms do not have the margins to do this and are forced into blast ads.
Many other commenters here mention that the ad ecosystem is up for a change, much like pop-ups a decade ago. Perhaps a more curated environment is going to appear for a little while.