What are these solutions? I help run a moderately-popular failblog exposing sexism in gaming, but aside from a few isolated cases, the advertising "interest" we get is people wanting to set up link exchanges advertising acai berries or whatever.

I'm presuming this is because the good ad networks don't need to look for sites to display on, but I haven't found anything else that's as good as AdSense. (And due to TOS, we can't run AdSense.)

Well via my ex employer I can get $25 CPM, and ad sense is around $0.40 CPM on average. Its just foolish to use google advertising IMO

Who is your ex-employer?

A television network, so they have a proper sales team etc... and direct dialogue with business and agencies.

The network ran trials of using Google ads on certain pages, and some did OK $10k per page per month (on popular pages). But at the end of the day that barely covers costs of running the network.

Google can't supply the cross medium advertising either, so most agencies are more than happy to pay the extra $24.60/cpm to actually get to the desired markets. The old saying "you get what you pay for" really sums it up really.

Should point out that its not probably closer to USD$20 CPM as I'm not in the states