We've got Adsense[1] as a fall back but no matter what I do it only ever generates pocket money. We also get approached regularly by dodgy agencies operating out of dodgy regions placing "remnants" that are basically scams of the "You're the 100,000th visitor, click here for your free iPhone" variety. We could look at running our own telesales but that's not necessarily any better and then we have to provide all the analytics and serving.
There's seems to be a real hole in the market for an agency system aimed at SME websites. The UK (and global) advertising industry isn't really serving either the SME publisher or the SME advertiser. At least part of the problem is that the Industry only wants to talk about 2 legs of the 3-legged stool. It's all about the Advertiser and Agency and never about the Publisher. Publishers are seen as an unfortunate overhead. There are a couple of systems out of California aimed at niche websites (run by friends of friends), but they either don't work at all in the UK or don't want to cover the UK.
[1]Adsense-Adwords. Google is really playing both publisher and agency with this game. I've got into trouble with Google people before for criticising them for this. Adwords can work well for the advertiser to drive traffic because your adverts appear on Google Search. But the only people I've ever heard of that made money from AdSense were basically scamming it by specifically aiming their content at high priced keywords and burying the ads right in the middle of the content so people clicked through by accident.
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One alternative is to produce video content. Video content offers a few more options, including pre-roll advertising and sponsorship. These tend to be larger CPMs than pure-play media placement, but (again, in my experience) this is topic-dependent.
It's not amazing news I'm afraid, and our discussion internally always ultimately came down to increasing traffic through distribution, which was more achievable than doing large media spends. Good luck!
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