Daring Fireball does a great job of integrating ads into the page. Gruber sells a small banner in the corner, which is basically the only part of his page with

Daring Fireball does a great job of integrating ads into the page. Gruber sells a small banner in the corner, which is basically the only part of his page with any color in it so it really stand out. Then he has a weekly sponsor post where he plugs that week's sponsors. He also has an individual sponsor for his RSS feed where he puts an article plugging them into the RSS feed. Granted, that only works because he has an established enough audience that he can have sponsors come a-courting. But that's the difference between building an audience and trawling for traffic. Josh Marshall runs Talking Points Memo largely on subscriptions, with ad revenue as a supplement. He wrote an entire article about how he prefers to keep his day-to-day expenses for the year paid through reliable funding streams like subscriptions and using more variable sources, like ad revenue, to support investments for future growth, capital investment, etc. I think he prefers to not feel over-a-barrel to advertisers or traffic as well, just out of a sense of journalistic integrity.