"I also found that even with 1000 visitors a month, I was making less than $5 per month with adsense. That would be fine if it didn't take a continual flow of r

"I also found that even with 1000 visitors a month, I was making less than $5 per month with adsense. That would be fine if it didn't take a continual flow of real posts to build content, but it does. This soured me on adwords based based businesses" $5/month for 1000 monthly visitors is not bad for ads in general. Assuming maybe 10% of those visitors are really active and the others are just one off hits (1-2 pageviews) you're looking at about 5000 pageviews/month which would equate to $1 eCPM on AdSense, which is actually a pretty decent ad network eCPM.