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For a small site, Amazon Associates is probably the most reliable and non-shady opportunity besides Google. If the site get's a few million pageviews a month, options improve.

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If you're in a niche area you could try selling ads directly to relevant companies, preferably with a geographical connection

This is what my company does and it works well enough, though your site would need a reasonable amount of traffic or industry clout before an ad-buyer would take your email/call seriously.

>...though your site would need a reasonable amount of traffic

Any insight on what a reasonable amount of traffic amounts to based on your experience?

My knowledge is primarily for professional industries as opposed to consumer, but it would likely depend greatly on your target audience.

I don’t remember specifically but I feel like we probably moved off Adsense when we were around 50k uniques/mo, but for a fairly specific niche.

One idea is to investigate who advertises on similar sites and examine their traffic/rates to see where you match up.

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