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.

At https://officesnapshots.com we’ve sold and hosted our own ads for the last 5 years. It seems to work well for all involved (us, readers, advertisers).

And I see those ads with uBlock Origin installed, congratulations, you're doing it right! I've seen this on one other site in probably the past 10 years. I think it was a custom furniture site I couldn't afford anything on but I was so surprised to see ads and that they weren't tracking me, I emailed just to cheer them on.

Yep hosting your own ads is the way to go. This way you are actually in control of your own content instead of relying on Google.

The problem is that you need to be big enough to negotiate your own ad deals. Hosting your own ads isn’t the challenge. Good luck with that.

My thinking is that the most difficult part is creating a website where people want to advertise specifically, then connecting with those people, with the easiest part being the actual negotiation stage.

For those looking to jump into direct sales and self-hosting, my suggestion is to create a second position of an ad unit you sell through a network and try to sell that without removing your existing ad network unit. Then work to contact the people who advertise on your site through the network and try to sign them up directly.

Chances are you can save them money while still bringing in more revenue as you no longer share revenue with the network.

Marco Arment - a one man development shop set up his own ad network for his podcast app....