I'm running into the same issues. DevFactor (http://www.youtube.com/devfactor) runs entirely on ad-funding and donations. After shutting down our WordPress site to roll our on RoR custom application, Google penalized our SEO for being offline so long.

Ad-earnings in December 2014: $700, Affiliate Earnings: $200, Donations: $25.

We now have a YT channel that is monetized, bringing in about $150/mo. Because Google basically declared us dead and dropped all of our ranks (we where offline for 1 month) - http://www.devfactor.io has gone from 300k uniq/mo to like 5k uniq/mo.

CPM rates have also been dropping :( Hard to offer such a important service that takes hundreds of hours to build up when the $/hour comes out to below minimum wage.

December 2014 CPM rates (website) where around $1.5. Now looking at $0.50.

Affiliate earnings have not changed (on a per/visitor basis), and I would suggest looking into affiliate programs as they provide more stability month to month (no reliance on ad-market CPM fluctuations.)

There have been weeks in the past when I've spent 80 hours or more on this project - bummer the good CPM rates are getting eaten up by how much noise there is in the market. Preference for quality is really a thing of the past for the internet it seems. To write and record a really good tutorial series, transcribe it all and pull out the important code can take 100 hours. Other blogs just hack out an un-edited snippet of code every 30 minutes and get much more traffic.

Once I finish migrating all of our old text-based tutorials to video tutorials, and get good enough to consider myself a "decent video editor". I have consider offering a "Pay What You Want" option for additional features and support. The nature of the project is of course a passion project, so charging outright would be hard for me to do.