somebodysomeone

Sort of. I took various information sets (some external, some my own), and spent a lot of time pivoting them, merging them etc so that they could be useful. You couldn't find the information as it is on the website elsewhere in the same form, but you could research and produce it yourself, albeit at a much slower pace and with a lot of insider knowledge required.

It was certainly an area that I was interested in and understood. Also, I made a conscious decision to choose something that would have interest for a very broad group of people, or that was owned by a lot of people.

Generally no. When I add info it tends to be in bulk (augmenting existing information pages), and then this will be done as a stand-alone project - the info tends to need lots of massaging and making intelligent to give it value.

Approached the traffic filtering from a number of directions - I log and background parse the incoming traffic to look for IPs and ranges that are generating excessive traffic, and get notified of issues. From there I can temporarily/perm block them if desired. I also have a script that can temporarily block all Tor exit nodes, as occasionally I get attempted spamming/scraping from there.

For automating scraping/spamming protection, I would consider something like CloudFlare Security though, my own tools are good enough for now, but I would still be vulnerable to a DDoS or a botnet scrape - it's enough to stop one-man scrapers but I'll need something beefier soon.

Ad formats that seem to work best: 728x90 by a long margin. I generally top and tail the content section with a leaderboard ad. I do serve different sizes for mobile etc, but the leaderboard works way better. I've also experimented with skyscrapers and boxes, which performed very poorly (skyscrapers especially).

I built an information website (not USA) that now pulls in roughly $8800 a month via adsense. To get to that figure takes about 500k user sessions/month (lots of long tail traffic). Runs on a single medium website instance in Azure, takes about an hour a day in maintenance and monitoring for malicious traffic like scraping that can be a problem for info sites (I've mostly automated this).

The initial time outlay was quite large, but it was always approached from the point of view of generating a lot traffic to get the payback.

Won't share the link as it's a competitive niche.