I don’t expect Discourse to figure everything out for me, the problem is that there seems to be an issue with most of the options to generate revenue, including with the AdPlugin itself.
I’m not that techy, so while I could give things a try, I’m not a dev so could troubleshoot the issues.
The Google AdSense part of the plugin doesn’t work. Page views in Adsense are more in line with First Sessions than Pageviews. I’m not sure what exactly is the issue but the whole SPA element of Discourse throws AdSense completely. I asked loads of times on here and no one could tell me if GAM worked any better.
I tried AdButler with Smarty Ads and while the AdButler Ad units generated what appeared to be a correct number of impressions, Smarty ads were only registering a fraction of the ad requests they should have been, given the cost of AdButler it was losing me money. It’s possible this could be made to work but at that point, I was in talks with managed Ad Agencies.
In talks with two of the large ad agencies and when they saw/heard I was on Discourse they ended the talks even though they both said they can work with SPAs, they said Discourse would require too much customization.
I am currently running with an ad provider who claimed they had worked with Discourse before but when I spoke with their dev he said they hadn’t actually used Discourse, but they had success with SPAs previously. Currently, the ads are running (using the house ads to add the tags) and while they are getting decent impressions it’s still far short of what it should be by my calculation.