If you do not get approved by adsense, it is not an viable option.<p>I have a site with views in the millions, but no adsense. Adding any other ad delivery service creates a lot of spam and makes the website yuck. And the payout is orders of magnitude less than adsense. So i have just foregone ads and host on my own cost.<p>Getting into Adsense is becoming difficult and there are lots of horror stories of them randomly suspending accounts without payouts.
Office Snapshots (<a href="https://officesnapshots.com" rel="nofollow">https://officesnapshots.com</a>) here.<p>We switched away from ad networks ~5 years ago in favor of selling and hosting our own ads which are static jpg/pngs.<p>Our ads are matched against the content (office furniture ads on office design content) which still targets the reader in a roundabout way in that they will likely be interested in the ads if they are interested in the content.<p>There are several benefits including faster site, keeping 100% of the revenue, and getting to control the quality of ads to ensure a great experience for our readers.<p>We have also been removing 3rd party scripts (share buttons, etc) over the last year or so and only have Google Analytics and a Google Font left. The site still works if you block them.
From my experience, eCPMs have not gone down in the past 10 years, at least for adsense . Which means that ads are not a worse monetization than it was in the past if that's what you are asking.