Selling ads directly is the best when you've got the time and energy to do it. That's what I do on my site and it does produce higher returns. We also got rid

Selling ads directly is the best when you've got the time and energy to do it. That's what I do on my site and it does produce higher returns. We also got rid of Adsense a few months ago as the ads were generally of lower quality and didn't match the market of our publication all of the time (retargeting, etc). We also use only images for ads, as we try to have them be of magazine quality. I'm sure some people visiting the site use Adblock etc but most advertisers are happy with the traffic they receive that losing a few views doesn't seem to bother them.