Dedicated advertising?
dkasper: Think of getting direct advertising like any other business sale you will make. You are selling the advertiser on the idea that getting their ads in front of your traffic will be valuable to them. This involves either you contacting them or if you are high profile enough them contacting you. There are lots of blog posts out their with more detail on how to do this. After doing this a lot you will probably start to see the value in a good ad network in a new way :-)The amount you will get can vary widely but CPMs can be very high $5-$10 is a pretty good baseline, but it varies depending on a number of factors such as how much traffic you get, how targeted and engaged the audience is, etc.