Having been involved in a number of sites and forums and web games since the inception of the WWW… I have to say that the ad revenue route has only ever appeared profitable in Huge corporate situations like Google or in scam sites where users are tricked to click on ads that look like useful links.

For small and medium sized sites, even in Web 2.0, I think Tip Jars and direct contributions are the only option for making money. The overhead is near 0 and the annoyance factor of the ads are gone (Dunno about you, but I have never seen an ad on PJmedia… I block all ads.) Also, it allows the consumer to determine the value of the product and contribute accordingly… which provides good feedback to the content owners.

The only other option is paid subscriptions for access to private content and services (maybe forums or chat etc). I dunno if this path would work for PJMedia though, since it seems more focused on accessible communication.

I hope your contributors recoginize the constraints of the medium.