Advice: how to monetize a website with – 30,000 page views per month?

Developers are a notoriously hard-to-monetize crowd, and more developers have adblockers installed than any other demographic. So I would avoid normal advertisements.

Here's what you need to do:

1) Collect email addresses

2) Sell things to the email addresses. Books come to mind.

e.g. "Want to hear my recommendations for programming books? Leave your email."

Or, as another commenter suggested, write a book yourself.

Also put some amazon affiliate links to books somewhere on the site.

I have also a 30-35K monthly pageviews niche blog and my experience says that is very difficult to monetize a website like this. I never made more than 90€/month (including all sources of income) with an average of 60€/month. Anyway my two cents are:

- donations: forget about it. Before put ads up I tried paypal donations. That only got me $5 despite remembering readers about it every couple of weeks for 5 months.

- ads (adsense): ugly and annoying but is the most important and stable source of income my blog has. 80% of all income.

- amazon affiliates: margins are low but with some work (and luck) you can get a decent source of monetization. Probably depends also on your niche market. 20% of my blog income.

- email marketing: since recently I have been collecting emails but didn't use it yet. Anyway my market target is mostly students so the potencial income will be low.