Where am I going wrong?

I’m sorry to be creating a post that im pretty sure you are so sick of seeing, but well I really need some help and advice right now. I could read and search for countless tutorials and previous similar posts but I kind of figure each situation like this is pretty unique to the owner and the site. Anyway enough babble, the problem:

I used to moderate a gaming site for a massive gaming company in England called gamer.tv they created the site which I own now, weplayhere.com. However, they were too big for the site basically, had grand ideas but the 80 strong team they employed was simply too expensive to cover a site like this. I purchased the site for $xx,xxx which I still believe was a great investment.

I have overcome a lot of the technical problems of the site and now im left with only a couple, my biggest one is generating a revenue. We have had various ad networks on the site and I did find a semi successful combination of targetfirst and fastclick. This saw us earn $1,000 in a month for the very first time. However, with targetfirst seemingly going out of business now (I am owed $580 for last months ads and that is now 11 days late) I have pulled their ads. I am trying a tribalfusion and fastclick combination but don’t seem to be matching the $1,000 earnt previously, infact far from it.

I don’t know what to do now, I refuse to believe the site does not have the potential to make money so it can only be me. I pride myself on my business sense but this site has really shown me up. Traffic has declined slightly since I purchased the site 6 months ago, we were hitting over 120,000 uniques a month while now we are hitting about 80,000. We have over 200,000 registered members and gaining 15,000,000-25,000,000 hits a month.

We had a forum for this site but it was hosted on a different domain, I took the decision this week to merge it with the site and now its hosted under the weplayhere.com domain. Hopefully this will increase the CRM revenue but time will tell. I seem unable to get people interested in buying text links, I do have 3-4 buyers on there now but that’s far below my expectations. I even figured member donations would be a decent level, but right now we get nothing from that too. Guess I was being way too optimistic in thinking some would appreciate the effort needed to keep the site free for all to play.

So here it is, after a long post I am asking for help and advice on how to turn this round now. I wanted to earn enough to support me to be able to do this full time, I knew it wouldn’t be easy and would take time, but right now we are barely covering costs let alone covering a wage. I will appreciate any help you can offer!

Thanks

 

I've found that branching out is good. Prizes for reviews of games will have gamers writing content for you (and it's content, after all, that attracts the ads). You could expand that into reviews of gaming related hardware: Video cards, monitors etc. Those items attract slightly higher cost ads. (And the Chitika that I promote in my sig pays over $1.50 per click in my experience and for these specific items).

It may come of no consolation to you that your target market is notoriously difficult to monetise and the traffic is seen as low value traffic. It may be in your interest to expand the content of the site a bit as per my earlier suggestion and attract - at least on some pages - a different kind of visitor.

 

Well, since it's a gaming site CPC will probably not work well, so you're basically stuck with CPM ads. For the latter I would recommend you two more companies you should try: CasaleMedia and Burst!Media. I use both of them and they do both pay good and are high quality.

You should then build a chain of ad networks to be able to serve paying ads for all your traffic. For example something like Tribal Fusion > Burst > Casale > Fastclick > etc..

You might also want to think about using Popups. They would probably pay very good and on gaming sites users are normally okay with those.