The way to approach Conde is to present a concrete business plan for
monetization and ask separate budget for it. What you have in place now is
operational budget, just to keep the site up. If you ask them for more money to expand server capacity to support more page view, they will roll their eyes saying, great, sinking more good money into the operation hole. Business people see operation cost as something to cut, unless it brings in additional revenue.
Tell them your priority has shifted from gaining market share (page views) to bigger margin (profit=revenue-cost). Business people like increasing margin. And tell them you need to do a number of experiments to figure out what work, which cost additional money. Tell them there are two options: 1. give a new budget for monetization while keeping the existing operational budget, which is already thin in keeping the current site SLA. 2. Cut the operational budget in half, reduce site SLA, and divert the other half to monetization. Reducing SLA means having less servers, less operational staff, slower site, more crash, less visitors coming in, and some unpopular moves to increase conversion. But that's ok since as part of the plan you've stopped seeking for market share.
Be bold and ask more for a new budget. Say you need 20 more racks initially, 9 sales, 2 marketing, 2 biz dev, 4 more engr, and 3 managers. And need 20 more backend servers for the new initiative; dealing with merchants aren't cheap. You need the sales guys to sign up merchants, the marketing guys to figure out what work and manage ad campaigns, the biz dev guys to recruit big merchants like Dell or Amazon and managing ad inventory, and the engineers to build up the merchant facing infrastructure.
Excite them by painting huge upside monetization potential, which is true. Targeted CPC can be very lucrative, like minting money. Online merchants typically will budget 10%-15% on marketing, which is what pays CPC. Think how big the online ecommerce is and take 10% of that. That's why those merchant specific subreddits, deal/coupon, whatnot are so important because the redditers clicking out from those links are very qualified leads for the merchants who are willing to pay dear money for them.
If Conde is still unwilling to invest, then that's just life. Stop investing in increasing operational capacity. Accept the fact that site will run slower and have less visitors. That's fine. That's the max capacity of the site given the budget. Just enjoy the ride. And wait until Conde sells it to someone else who's willing to take it to the next level.