We were once in a similar situation too. Thousands of signups (site featured on techcrunch, mashable, et al) but the ad money wasn't enough. So I said fuck it and we switched to $5/mo with a 14 day free trial. Lot of people were pissed off, and some sites even put our site in their "hall of shame". But guess what? you have to bear the storm for a few days and then it starts to become okay.
What really paid off for us is that we didn't give up and started working on a totally new version of our software (which we wrote from scratch) and instead of $5 or something, we offered rather big premium packages ($49/mo, $99/mo with 40% discount if ordered yearly) and that is when we really started making some good money.
The users got 1/50th, which was good and bad. Good because the insane # of support tickets also dropped and we were running just fine with a single dedicated server. Bad because our traffic dropped badly, but it didn't die all the way. Being on big sites gave us some really good Google rankings that we still have around 100 new signups per day. We could have put a "So long and thanks for all the fish" blurb and killed our site but good thing we stuck around and kept innovating. It's definitely not our flagship product anymore but the site still makes 6 figures yearly. So what i'm saying is try to create something for your audience and try to sell it hard to them. When you have a ton of traffic, even a small segment of customers in your audience can still make you good money.
What really paid off for us is that we didn't give up and started working on a totally new version of our software (which we wrote from scratch) and instead of $5 or something, we offered rather big premium packages ($49/mo, $99/mo with 40% discount if ordered yearly) and that is when we really started making some good money.
The users got 1/50th, which was good and bad. Good because the insane # of support tickets also dropped and we were running just fine with a single dedicated server. Bad because our traffic dropped badly, but it didn't die all the way. Being on big sites gave us some really good Google rankings that we still have around 100 new signups per day. We could have put a "So long and thanks for all the fish" blurb and killed our site but good thing we stuck around and kept innovating. It's definitely not our flagship product anymore but the site still makes 6 figures yearly. So what i'm saying is try to create something for your audience and try to sell it hard to them. When you have a ton of traffic, even a small segment of customers in your audience can still make you good money.