Monetizing a site

I am one of the admins of a site that gets five to six digit uniques daily - forum and portal combined with mostly custom coding.

The only issue is this: how would you monetize a site where 99-100% of the users run Adblock and Noscript, most do not even allow scripting for trusted sites, and are essentially all geeks. Running a normal ad network would run off at least half the users instantly, running any ad networks that serve a single exploit would result in a 90% drop in traffic (tried with adsense)

Any idea?

 

Try running simple image banners or text advertisements that advertisers would have to submit to you and you would review and charge them a monthly free. This way you don't run it through an ad network and they cannot be blocked by adblock without custom configuration (Atleast the text ads)

 

I tried to do text link ads, just one unrelated link at the bottom immediately resulted in over 200 PMs of "was the site hacked?!?!" unfortunately..

 

Ask for Donations? Sell a premium version of the site?

 

How about placing a banner?
The image is hosted on your site, so it will not blocked by adblock.
Or may be link sales is good way.

 

You can sell space on your website. Place paid banners and post sponsored content

 

If you cant have advertising on a website, the next best thing is have a premium and/or donation service, saying how the server cost is high etc etc etc.

 

that would be begging
how about breaking iframe?

 

What do you mean breaking iframe? None of the pages are allowed to be framed - they all send the HTTP header of X-Frame-Options.

I really don't want to lie, but server costs are around $40 - it's a quad xeon coloed with a friend, costs close to nothing..

 

I would advise running media banners, but CTR of those go to 0.00%, gigs are not clicking on banners.
The only real solution might be developing and introducing your own add-on service, for which people will pay you (subscription).