Ask HN: Is it worthwhile it to put ads on a site (Alexa ranked #2,209,472)?

Without a dedicated sales staff willing/able to compete with big ad suppliers like Spotify and Facebook, then you are likely selling so-called remnant impressions delivered automatically via ad networks like AdSense. Remnant impressions are highly commoditized.

Unless you are in a shady or otherwise lucrative niche that has limited supply of impressions and attracts lots of competition (e.g. Asbestos removal or DUI lawyer advice) you can expect to earn $2 CPM or so on a good day and as little as 8 cents per thousand ads for some traffic. There are quality/revenue tradeoffs: typically, the higher quality advertiser, the less they'll pay you for remnant.

Even with multiple ads on the page, these are very hard economics unless you operate at a very large scale. I'd advise a fellow journalist not to pursue an ad strategy until they have more than 2,000 people on their site every day, and ideally more like 10k+.

Alexa is basically meaningless, the whole premise of it is fundamentally flawed.

But with regards to your site, it costs nothing to put ads on there, so you have nothing to lose. You could also approach a company and ask to be sponsored, you carry their banner and they pay you $x a month.

Trying to make an extra ~$2/month is not even worth thinking about.