Quick question, is your traffic loyal?
Is your traffic very niche specific?
Is the bulk of your traffic coming from North America or Western Europe?
If you answered yes to all the questions above, I suggest you strongly consider producing your own content.
Since you're in the best position to learn the actual demand patterns of your visitors, the chances are very high that you could create content that they would respond to well.
Sell this content.
Make money by consistently reselling this content.
In fact, if you build a mailing list offering free content at first in the form of a book, that mailing list will continue to pay for itself long into the future.
You're just opening your mind here to other ways of monetizing your website.
Going with a third-party ad platform is the easy way but there are more effective ways, assuming that your traffic is indeed loyal.
