This is always a touchy subject I find. Especially since I'm usually on the receiving end of trying to figure out an optimal solution.
My site is run on a dedicated server. This roughly costs me around €250 per month. We provide a huge amount of services (
full card database,
card tooltips for developers, full
API, article writers who need to be paid and more) which made this a necessity. On top of that Cloudflare, Google Cloud Storage and a few other things add about €120ish to that per month for a total of around €370 which is rather expensive.
We absolutely need ads on the site to keep the site afloat. I have heavily looked into alternative forms of revenue (dontations, patreon, etc) but none of them are quite good enough to keep the site up. I have tried my absolute hardest to not make the ads on the site annoying or intrusive (more on that with my next point). I have a very small message on the homepage if ad-blocker is detected.
At the start of 2019, I entered an advertising partnership with Fanbyte. They have taken over the ads on the site and they are in charge of the ads (but I still have the final say at the end of the day if I choose to).
We agreed on some ads and I disagreed and denied others (video that scrolls with you in the sidebar I said "no" to).
Now the hard part. I remember sharing an article from the site once and all USA based users were being ad-redirected to these malware giveaway sites. Needless to say, I was super pissed and not happy. Obviously this is not what I intended or wanted. I shot an email to the ad team and they had the redirects blacklisted and the advertiser blacklisted and fully apologized to me. I'm still a little annoyed at the situation but these things do happen and often happen unintentionally. They even happened when I was alone with Google ads and I had to report them to Google.
I'm not entirely sure what my point is (a lot of rambling) except that these things are a constant headache and sometimes very hard to directly control.