I would like you to share the story of your revenue-generating weekend project, which would be a great inspiration for the rest of us.
In a nutshell it takes any word or PDF document, strips all the formatting and repopulates a new word document with predefined fonts, layout etc. Sounds simple & basic? That's the point. We're near completion and once we launch it will be a simple service that can have a significant impact on the industry I currently work in.
If your version performs better than what some of the existing players are using, you might be able to OEM/white label it for them.
A lot of recruitment companies, at least here in the UK, pay significant annual salaries to an 'admin' person to sit and format CV's all day long. Why pay them £25k a year to execute a task that takes them about 20 minutes when you could pay us about 70-80% less (pricing point yet to be determined) for a product that executes the task instantly?
They also do CV reformatting, and because they've got structured data to work with can even entirely recreate a new CV based on the candidate's data.
If you want to move into that market as a stand-alone reformatting product, you'd need to integrate with the range of CRMs in use (Adapt, EZAccess, Itris, etc - some of these have CV reformatting built in, too). This is a market where they want it all to 'just work', and you'll end up dealing with some really really demanding people.
And you also risk an established player deciding to extract out their reformatting tool as a stand-alone product and leveraging their existing sales network to block you.
Which is why I was suggesting OEMing it to CRM developers, which would let you side-step companies like Daxtra. If the recruitment agency isn't doing enough business to afford to get Adapt or whatever, then they're either just starting up (and will drop you for an integrated solution as they grow) or about to fail.
Edit: just looked at your profile, and I'm pretty sure you'll know all about Daxtra. :o) If Volt aren't using it already, ask your account manage for a demo of reformatter, and keep in mind that Daxtra could turn that into a stand-alone SaaS offering pretty easily.
The butt fell out of Adsense for many areas in 2008-2009ish though and I've never had any further success with it in the developer space (though I did very well in the mass market up till about 2009). I run some other reasonably successful sites in the developer space and Adsense is basically a no-go - results as bad as you've mentioned.
If I were in your shoes, I'd dabble with some affiliate programs. I've already been doing this and having success on my developer focused sites. Only high quality stuff but latest books, e-books, courses, events, etc. I notice you have Carbon on there and if I recall correctly, they approached me and the CPM was laughably bad (though this may have changed..), I want/need to be making $5-10 CPM overall from display advertising.
Now whenever I come up with something that doesn't leave me alone for a couple of days I just go for it, without any expectations.
The last one I launched was a very simple iOS App (http://airlocationapp.com) which was actually done in less than a weekend, pitched to only a single blog and generated about $700 since launch, which was roughly one month ago.
My best selling apps, a suite of remotes for iOS (http://reemoteapp.com) actually started off as weekend project just like that but initially hit a bigger niche and now turned into my main project/income.
I can't read the text on your website though, and I'm sure that I'm not alone. (the captions under the logos)
I'm the sole technical force behind the project. Front-end is on Android Honeycomb tablets, back-end uses Erlang for the web server and middle-ware and PostgreSQL for the database. I also work full-time so progress is a bit slow.
FTFY.
It is also far less offensive than using "his" to reference all hackers on HN, among which I fall into the female minority.
"their [thair; unstressed ther] 2. (used after an indefinite singular antecedent in place of the definite masculine form his or the definite feminine form her ): Someone left their book on the table. Did everyone bring their lunch?"
Wikipedia:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Singular_they
"Singular they is the use of the pronoun they (or its inflected forms) when plurality is not required by the context. Singular they indicates indeterminacy:
either in regard to number — "Anyone who thinks they have been affected should contact their doctor";
or, controversially, regarding gender — "One student failed their exam."
Not meaning to dismiss the underlying issue though. I just think that, short of inventing a new word, singular "their" makes a lot more sense.
In my experience I thought only other guys coded and then I went for an interview that went awful. I was interviewed by two people separately. First was a guy, who was the Director of Development. Before he left the room, he said Janice will be interviewing you next. I thought she must be the office manager or HR person and during interview I said "Oh so you do the HR stuff around here?" She said, "No, I code," to which I replied "You code - huh?" Needless to say I didnt get that job, yet I learned something.
"Hi, this is $obvious_female_name calling from $company for $candidate, please?"
"Oh, I thought this would be a technical interview."
Result? Instant 1.0 score, which basically means that if you hire this person, I will quit.
Turns out they've hired a bunch of those people anyway, and I quit anyway.
It also adds a watermark for images created by designers. That helps designers to show verified websites that they have helped design.
No plans on making money yet. But we do have a fair number of registrations every day!
It got 9 million users and made quite a nice sum from ads.