The crazy thing for me is that I still did depend on ads to keep my free content alive. On the cheapest hosting option one of my sites would run into around $40 worth of hosting a month plus endless hours of moderation and 'fixing'.
I did experiment with self hosted ads. Sorrily this is a pain in itself because for whatever reason a lot of adblockers block anything that appears like a obvious ad. Even self hosted images if they may are in a subdirectory called ads or have a id therelike. So I called everything 'meow' instead of ads. A month later a popular ad block list included a filter for my ads... (~3 million sessions/month) and my self hosted, non evil, non JS ads were blocked again.
Not to mention that the income was not even a 10th.
I still am undecided on the topic. But i want people to understand that especially Adsense is indeed important for small publishers.
End of the story is i sold the site because Adsense started to pay less and less for more traffic and now a ad company is milking my back then only Adsense site with about 5 more trackers and ad networks...