There was no automatic advertising delivery. There was no personalization, or any kind of tracking. Instead, I go through all of this every morning, picking which ads I thought looked interesting today, and manually changing and updating the pages on my site.This also meant that, because there was no tracking, the advertising companies had no idea how many times an ad was viewed, and as such, we would only get paid per click.Now, the bigger sites had started to do dynamic advertising, which allowed them to sell advertising per view, but, as an independent publisher, I was limited to only click-based advertising.However, that was actually a good thing. Because I had to pick the ads manually, I needed to be very good at understanding my audience and what they needed when they visited my site. And so there was a link between audience focus and the advertising.Also, because it was click based, it forced me as an independent publisher to optimize for results, whereas a 'per view' model often encouraged publishers to lower their value to create more ad views.

Aligning editorial mission and business model is critical.