Is it worth it?

It varies depending on your site, it can vary a lot, but you might get between $1 to $5 per thousand views.

If making your site ugly made you rich that would be one thing. If making your site ugly can pay for a Netflix membership that's another thing. That said, a site like that might cost $5 a month to run and it is possible it could cover your operating costs.

That's the hard choice for me tbh, you explained it very well. Currently the operating costs are $0 since it's hosted entirely on Vercel's free tier, so my hope is mainly just to justify me spending a few hours a month improving it with new features and stuff.

Currently, it's hard to justify working on anything new for it since it is just a helpful web-tool, there's really no future for it beyond making it slightly more helpful for people's niche use-case. On the other hand, I don't want to ruin it for a couple bucks a month, so I need to be really careful on how I do this.

Do you really want to do it? As the op said you are unlikely to make any meaningful amount from it. What is your motivation?

Honestly my main motivation is just that it doesn't feel worth it to spend time on most side projects because I could be putting that time towards my real paid tech job and actually be making money, so adding some profit makes it feel more worth it to do side projects i guess?

I do it for: fun, learning and planting a flag. Someday you might be looking for a new job and if you have some projects to show off that's the best thing for your job hunt.

(e.g. when I was at rock bottom in my life, my HELOC was maxxed out and I just rolled my car, I started what I expected to be a difficult job hunt so I created an 'application management system' and talking about that landed me a job at an AI company with my interview. Out of the experience writing that I've written a few intelligent assistants such as an RSS reader which shows me just the most interesting articles and an image sorter that lets me easily work with 800,000 images with Chinese metadata even though I don't really know Chinese.)

Carbon Ads seems like a good option: https://www.carbonads.net/

I'm building something that would be better to monetize through ads but I need something like instagram stories to fit well into my product. Couldn't find anything good.

If the content is software development focused https://www.ethicalads.io/ (https://www.ethicalads.io/publishers/calculator/)

Ooh, that looks wonderful for future projects, but sadly my current one isn't targeted at devs.

Quick question, have you used it for side projects before, and if so how was your experience? It might be nice to try to launch a side project and monetize it with this, having a small amount of profit would make it a lot easier to justify some things I'd love to work on sometime.

I'm not the poster you're responding to but I'm one of the founding team of EthicalAds. We're a small team, focused exclusively on marketing to devs, and really trying to show high-quality ads without tracking people (ads are contextually targeted).

You can get a feel for what you'll earn here[1]. Basically you earn 70% of the gross of what we charge advertisers (see advertiser pricing[2]). Keep in mind these are ad views which aren't quite the same as pageviews. They're a subset.

Ads are a straight-forward path to monetization but not always the best. If you can make a project work as SaaS or really make sponsorships work for you (this requires effort), those will definitely earn A LOT more money per pageview than ads. Ads require a lot of traffic to make them work well. Usually you want high tens to hundreds of thousands of pageviews per month.

From a what we look at for publishers (sites that show ads) perspective, we're usually looking for high quality dev-focused sites or projects that don't want to just show Google ads. Per ad, publishers will earn much more with us than Google display ads but if you want to stick 4-5 Google ads on your site, video ads, or the like we can't compete with that and we don't want our ads on sites that do that. Devs hate them. My email is in my bio if you want to discuss further.

Regardless, good luck on the projects!

[1]: https://www.ethicalads.io/publishers/calculator/ [2]: https://www.ethicalads.io/advertisers/pricing/

We used it years ago as advertisers. It didn't work for us. Our products is pretty niche even among software development, and VC funded startups can easily outspend us. We'd probably use them again if we had more marketing budget.