If you are working on making content or a tool for people into Monero, that's great. But what happens if your site starts getting traffic, attention and adoption but you aren't making any money from it, what should you do then?
It is a great feeling when people use your website, but unless it's a political mission, you will eventually want to earn money somehow. If it's a site in Monero, it's already targeted enough, already niche enough, to be able to run ads.
First, you need to know what space you actually have for ads, and if you want banners or text. If you want banners, see the standard ad sizes (there a few more even) and pick which one(s) you want. If you want text ads, they are more versatile but maybe less visually attentive.
In the case of Monerica, everything has been text ads. The reason for this is that the listings themselves are already approved so if someone wants to have an a sponsored listing, it can go live automatically without the delay. And personally, I do not like to wait for an ad to go live if I am paying money, I want to see it ASAP!
But if you do want banners, you will have to manually approve them. You simply cannot allow banners to go live without moderation or it will lead to some kind of illegal crap taking over. And I am writing all this assuming you are a clearnet site, with only a mirror for Tor or I2P if you want that.
How you go about approving the banners, that can be done in different ways. If you have no real technical skills to make this happen with a web form or account, then the banner will need to be sent to you over email or Telegram. But ideally you have a whole dashboard where someone can sign in, upload a banner, pay for it, you confirm it's the right size and reject it if it's not, then you approve it. In so doing, you build out a system where the banner goes live and expires after some range of time.
To get started, you should have an empty banner that says something like "ADVERTISE HERE" on it. When someone clicks on that, it should go to your lead generation page where they see the prices and way to contact you. Your prices should be in USD or XMR, but probably USD and they pay the converted amount in XMR at the time they buy. What someone wants to know is: what does it cost and for how long, are there limitations? For example, p*rn, gambling, etc. Do you allow that? If not, it says so.
If you take the payment before or after approving the banner is up to you. It's probably better to take the payment before and weed out the people who aren't good fits with the terms and policies. That way they aren't trying to upload something that you will reject. You really don't want to need to refund them. You really want the process to be as smooth as possible for the buyer.
Now, what do you actually show to the buyer after you have their ad approved? How can they track what is happening? If it's a banner, they are probably going to want to see impression and click counts. So you will have that and built a way to show it. Some may be tempted to rely on a 3rd party for this, but in the world of Monero, with ad blockers, you should be careful about that. You want your banner to load from your domain, or a subdomain like ads.yourdomain.com. This way the person has to see it or no content on your site displays. Yes, they could block a subdomain manually, but you will have to decide on this, in terms of how aggressive you want to be.
In terms of forcing people to see your display ads, people are more okay with them as long as they relate to Monero. If they are totally unrelated or appear highly targeted as a part of a network, then that is when people will want to block them. You are trying to deliver niche, targeted ads. Don't completely turn off people with what your ads show, they should be things people might actually use.
In terms of the links and tracking, you will usually want to redirect the user server side from your banner to the target link. This way there is tracking on how many people clicked. Now obviously there could be impression or click fraud and I cannot tell you an easy fix for that. But if you have some reporting to show this, that there was at least an attempt to have real data, that is better.
In the case of Monerica, there is no tracking, no reporting and no redirects. The links go directly to the target site. But, there is an HTML attribute on the links, and you will need to do this, the one that is "sponsored" so that search engines know that the placement is paid for. If you don't do that, it could cause some SEO issues.
Monerica goes with the no tracking approach since that is what Monero people generally like, not having to strip out a tracking parameter, and get their click logged. Sometimes people will ask for a query string that has a tracking parameter but in experience, this is rare and the ones who ask for it generally don't have the greatest business model or confidence in their service. Yes, I understand they want to know, but again people don't like being tracked at all in Monero.
Now, in terms of how people pay you, you will want to charge in Monero. You're going to have to get a payment processor like NOWPayments for starters or setting up BTCPay Server or similar for more control. I would discourage using a credit card processor. The only reason you may want to have that option is if you want to put someone on a subscription and rebill them. But it's against the idea of Monero to do that. If you are looking for fiat in your bank account, then just send it to Kraken, or swap it to Bitcoin, and send to a KYC centralized exchange that connects to your bank account. You can do this in part or in full.
One thing you should be careful of, if you are showing banners, is rotating them. If someone is buying a banner on a niche site, you should not rotate them to different banners in my opinion. You usually don't have enough traffic to be showing 3-5, randomly displaying them. It can turn advertisers away. So you should really just have 1 consistent display banner. Charge more money for this. You do not want advertisers to feel disappointed, if they go to your site and don't immediately see their ad, that is a problem!
Now, what about an alternative approach, one in which you don't want to deal with people at all and instead you use affiliate links? You can do that immediately. Just go and find Monero Affiliate Programs and make a banner for them. It will have tracking on it, which is almost always a cookie, but you do not need to wait. Most of the companies that want to pay for ads have affiliate programs anyway.
In terms of pricing, that is going to depend on your traffic. The more intent focused, the better. If you have an exchange review site, that is going to be higher value. If you are just a discussion site, it may be lower. Lower still if your just a Monero stats site where there is no buying intent at all. It really depend on where you are in the buying funnel. But any site people go to has some value. Just look around at what other people are charging and see where you fit in.
For those who do not like ads and sponsorship, the path is to ask for donations on a site like Kuno. This is something, yes. But it's not driving revenue to a business, it's basically begging. You could just ask for donations directly instead with the banners you have as well. Less formal and not tracked, but it is still an option.
Now, the important part, how do you actually get people to buy your ad space if that's what you're selling? The answer is, a good product sells itself. If you are generating traffic then the banner where you tell people to buy an ad is the way to get your buyer. Do not go out and email people or contacting them over messaging apps to get them to buy. If they have never heard of your site, it probably isn't a good fit. Anyone can fake numbers and say something that isn't true. If they already know you or your brand, then it can work but otherwise, you should be relying on the banner to sell itself.
In all likelihood, the banners you are going to have will be for instant swap exchanges. Other options would be web hosting and possibly prepaid cards.
This is the basic idea to turn your passion project, blog, utility, tool and so on into a way to pay your hosting costs and earn money. If you do all of this, then you can become a real content publisher earning for your work.