Question about monetizing a high-traffic, free site...

Hello everyone,

It's my first post here (I think), or at the very least my first thread, and I've been mostly lurking around, reading a lot of information. You guys are insanely smart and talented, and it's pretty cool how all this information is shared.

My question is, how can a site be monetized that has high-traffic, but a free service? How would you guys do it? Let's say you offer something free, the idea is good, the concept is unique, and you get thousands of visitors every day, your mailing list is in the tens of thousands, what now?

What if the website started simple, and you didn't want to "monetize" it in the beginning, so there were no ads or anything. Is it possible to monetize now without alienating frequent visitors? How much is a 20k email list worth? How much are thousands of daily visitors worth who come to your site for free content and aren't really "targeted" to any specific niche?

Just curious what some of you guys would do in this situation, thanks.

Dmr cpa my friend

I'm not following...I know what cpa means, but I had to search this forum to find out what DMR meant lol...the DMR thing I assume is used to hide the referrer from a network that might not like the traffic you're sending if you're using unethical methods, but would they have something against general traffic just because it's not targeted?

shouldn't think so if they dont know where traffic coming from using blank referrer then they can't argue that it's not targeted coz they just don't know where it's coming from, it could be super targeted and pro sites for all they know