This is smart advice always ofcourse, but, for instance, with adwords or adsense, for a long time you really didn't have a choice ; the rest is/was just garbage compared. Adwords has gone downhill a lot and this is good news for Facebook, Bing and others. Adsense still pays most for a lot of niches so a business just depending on ad sales will usually find it hard to diversify.
Now we used adwords for dating as well when Google just removed our ads for various reasons they never told us about (they didn't ban the account, they just told the ads would no longer run) and we did something which i'm not sure will still work but maybe it's worth investigating; we went 'local'; we found sites to advertise on and offline means in all parts of the country and got ads there (cheap) which turned out very effective. Especially on smaller local buy & sell sites / papers etc this returned far more than Google. A lot has changed so i'm not sure if it helps you any, but that's what we did and our profits jumped up with the added bonus that suddenly we had no dependency on Google anymore.