We're not big enough for the time and effort to make hosting the ads ourselves work. We can't even pay someone to manage our online ads the way things normally

We're not big enough for the time and effort to make hosting the ads ourselves work. We can't even pay someone to manage our online ads the way things normally work with larger publishers so, like the vast majority of smaller publishers, have to go the automated route of Google AdSense or similar. We've worked on other funding ideas including donations, merchandise, and the like, but these only work for a very small niche of publishers. Side note: Tracking is an unfortunate reality in today's market. We use Google Analytics for statistics because anyone that even thinks about partnering in any way wants to see that. They don't trust your internal stats as a general rule, since you could easily fake them. So, anyone that fully blocks tracking (Google Analytics et al) is looked at as sunk cost since you don't count as a user in terms of potential partnerships and you cost money in terms of machine time and bandwidth. I'm personally not a fan of this sort of tracking and wish there was another commercially viable option. I make donations available for folks who want to support the site directly. Even though we have a passionate community and many of them make donations, the unfortunate reality is that without the ads, I'd have to shut the site down. Either that or turn it into a paid commercial product, vastly shrinking the userbase but increasing the revenue, just to keep it going. I'm exploring some paid options, but many of them require a decent sized upfront capital investment that I don't currently have access to.