In august I made about $122,000 from display ads, mostly Adsense. 5-10% of that is spent on stuff like server space and freelance employees. I can imagine that this will not be taken seriously due to lack of details, but for anyone interested, I'm open to answering non-specific questions.
Edit: I see 'from what' is also the question; I have a bunch of entertainment related sites.
3) Hard to say. I can take a month off and it'll probably go fine. If it crashes, I'm on it 24/7 (if I care for my wallet). I do work on it full time, but that's working on growth as well as managing the present state. I try to outsource as many chores and secondary tasks as possible, leaving the multi-disciplinary work for me.
Surely, there are methods to squeeze more revenue out of Adsense, or any display ad for that matter, but you'll risk being banned. So that's not worth it, especially when you get bigger.
I do recommend trying out different ad networks and having them compete with each other and with adsense in an ad server such as OpenX or DFP.
I would probably work with other ad networks, but that wouldn't be cost effective to monetize my long tail of smaller sites. It would lead to a significant, if not huge, drop in revenue.
You do get in personal contact with people at Google starting at some level of revenue though. So if it ever happened, I guess I would see it coming in some way.
google doesn't care, the company that I work for does around 15x your monthly revenue and was banned from adsense and getting in contact with google was impossible, as was finding a resolution (other than "re-apply in 6 months").
Their huge reach. There's no network with the same amount of advertisers and publishers. Especially with smaller sites, they're the easiest way to monetize, and sometimes to only way at all.
I would love to hear some more on this if you don't mind. If you are making that kind of money, then our company is clearly doing something horribly wrong :)
You're not doing something wrong per se. I started out at the right time in the right niche, that helped me get away with a lot. I started out when in high school, when I had no costs of living, which is a great way to learn risk-free. As a result I now do 'marketing' as well as technical stuff, which keeps margins high, and gives me breadth in all those fields, which, I think, hugely contributes to my success. But mostly it's a matter of right place, right time...
4) I started out in the niche without knowing any SEO at all. Started building a product and built a lot of links for traffic. The authority and product I built then were the fundament for everything else. Not annoying my users, and building a strong site were always very important, as opposed to doing short-term black hat stuff while forgetting about content. I continually do keyword research; always keep my eyes open.
5) Not just Adsense, some other ad networks as well. All display ads though.
6) Depends. There are many keywords, some rank #1, some page #1, some don't rank at all. Depends on the quality of the content as well, I continually work on that.
7) For this project, yes. I've done PPC on other projects, but it doesn't seem to be profitable so far for this one.
8) Depends on what you call black hat. I've never spammed anything. Have bought a link here and there in the past, but I do have a huge amount of natural links as well. I guess that for industry standards, I'm pretty clean.
Edit: I see 'from what' is also the question; I have a bunch of entertainment related sites.