We use WordPress and plugins which offer these features so hosting and server costs are pretty minimal.

It definitely takes time and work to develop and maintain relationships, but we also get to keep 100% of the revenue. In some ways we've just decided that ownership of the relationship and process is more important than being able to quickly slap some Adsense code up on the site.

That said, we also used Adsense early on, but have been doing this for ~5 years.

I'm also wondering how revenue compares. Every one clearly seems to think that "perosnalized" ads are worth more; can you offer any insight into if you make more or less with personalized vs your approach?

People seem to have forgotten that users are most likely to be interested in what they are currently reading, because it is what their mind is currently focused on.

You can get a sense of advertising fees by looking at comparable newspaper ads and industry trade magazines. Even take a look at billboard or radio ads. Custom ads will be an order of magnitude higher that what you get from Google.

I wish I had a deep and thoughtful answer, but a simplistic one is that we do get to keep 100% of the revenue for the ads we sell so in that sense we make more.

Because our content is so specific, ads which are relevant to the content end up targeting the user because you wouldn't be spending time on the site unless you care about the content.