Without a dedicated sales staff willing/able to compete with big ad suppliers like Spotify and Facebook, then you are likely selling so-called remnant impressio

Without a dedicated sales staff willing/able to compete with big ad suppliers like Spotify and Facebook, then you are likely selling so-called remnant impressions delivered automatically via ad networks like AdSense. Remnant impressions are highly commoditized. Unless you are in a shady or otherwise lucrative niche that has limited supply of impressions and attracts lots of competition (e.g. Asbestos removal or DUI lawyer advice) you can expect to earn $2 CPM or so on a good day and as little as 8 cents per thousand ads for some traffic. There are quality/revenue tradeoffs: typically, the higher quality advertiser, the less they'll pay you for remnant. Even with multiple ads on the page, these are very hard economics unless you operate at a very large scale. I'd advise a fellow journalist not to pursue an ad strategy until they have more than 2,000 people on their site every day, and ideally more like 10k+.