Making money on entertainment related sites

[Ex]

I know that these sites are now not in demand by many advertisers but heck, they're so fun to run, that they just keep popping out daily.

I would like to start a discussion on how to make some money using these related topical sites. If you're running these topical sites and would wish to share a view or two, please do....

Let's start with what I'm doing at the moment....

For banners, I use BurstMedia and my in house specially created banners to promote targetwords. Then I uses SuperTaf coupled with popunders to my other related sites as well as Focalex.

I'm averaging around US$0.15 CPM overall (is this good?). Many might see that I do not use affiliate programs like FineClicks, AffiliateFuel, WebSponsors or even OnResponse. The reasons are simple, their ads does not match my demographics and I've tried with them and instead lowers my CPM to US$0.10 overall.

Forget about SI or PopupSponsors as they do not allow webmasters from banned countries (please don't go into these details as the forums have too much on it already).....

I've tried other means but to no avail. Getting your own advertisers are basically out of the questions since these sort of sites are not sought after at the moment.

Any other success stories out there?????? Btw, I do have a newsletter of 7000 subscriber double opt-in which I send periodically sales promotion on related items which so far, have netted me commission of around less than US$50 monthly if I send out 4X a month.

I've also found out that business/finance related sites nets higher CPM with lower page views and uniques. These must be due to the abundance of targetted affiliate programs and advertisers in the market. The problem, creating such a site needs expertise in getting content..which not many ppl can do.

Another type of sites are related to automotive topics, but so far, usually sites found through search engines are more on selling rather than content. Will not go into webmaster related topics as these sites are in abundance online.

Any views?