Experimenting with self-created ads

I've been going back and forward with the idea of placing ads in Nomoresheet. One of the conditions I wrote in the first year of creating the website was to avoid Google AdSense.

Ads are annoying as hell, I hate them.

But after years of running a website, you start to think of the model to make it sustainable. In the long run, I would like that the subscription model is enough to cover all the expenses of the website, but nowadays is not the case.

Nomoresheet is a content website, so I guess the best monetization model is one of apps like Reddit or Spotify: free with ads for zero paying users and no-ads/better features for paying users.

Over the last weeks, I've been creating some custom ads combining Unsplash images and Amazon URLs to make ads look decent. I've tried to make something nice without being annoying or intrusive.

Again, I hate ads as much as you, but I don't see another option.

This is what I'm talking about:

Another one:

I've placed products that I want to buy. So the first target is me. Let's take it as an experiment and see how it performs for a couple of months.