So I've been lurking this forum for a while and it seems to have some people with abundant experience. I thought I'd drop a line here and stop lurking to see if I can take advantage about that. First the facts; I own and operate an English literature/entertainment website, seeing in excess of 2 million pageviews a week, ~7 million impressions, a third of them US. Through working with three CPM networks and doing some tweaking with passbacks and floors, albeit no DFP, I'm pulling an average of roughly $0.5 CPM, mostly from the US traffic, all from networks, none from direct sales at present. I'm making a good amount right now, and I'm considering just resting on my laurels, but I would like to see if there's further monetization that can be done (and I'm sure there is). Implementing an adserver with geotargeting could definitely help, although I've no experiencing using them much. Popups/popunders/textlinks are out; hurting user experience is killing the goose that feeds the golden egg. CPC, for my type of site, has proven to be consistently inferior to CPM. I'm thinking direct sales is the only way to go up from here in a meaningful way, but hampering that is 1) A total lack of experience in pitching/finding direct sales, 2) A niche which isn't as immediately apparently related to specific products (compared to say a tech blog), and 3) Enough pageviews that I don't want to bother with doing dozens of smaller direct sales, but not enough to attract interest from the really big companies. I thought I'd like to hear everyone's opinions on my situation. Is direct sales a worthwhile way to go for me? Or should I just be happy that I'm able to monetize as well as I already am and just leave it at that?