If, at the end of all this, you don't have a clearer idea about how to help these people to happily give you their time / money / eyeballs, then maybe just leave it be and enjoy $30 worth of beer each month or something.
In terms of getting more $, affiliate income makes lots of money. In the old days when we used to run sites with adsense and affiliates, the affiliate income accounted for about 70% of the revenue. If you had a good place on your site for it, I'd start by looking in to the amazon associates program. FYI. The amazon affiliate pays out from 4% - 10% of the sale of the product.
We haven't monetized hackernoon.com at all and have instead focused on good content and we are now well into the millions of monthly uniques. Its not worth the time to monitize 3k visitors
The reason I'm not sharing the url is because the code is somewhat outdated and may be insecure. In my spare time I'm working on a new version which matches some of the recent security 'standards'. The website started as a project just for learning how to develop a basic website with interaction between users. So about seven years ago I tried becoming new instance of \Zuckerberg. I started chatting the website all over de chat-places. I added a twitter account, following (by hand :)) all those singles and lonely people out there hoping they follow back. Greeting them every day and helping other twitter addicts keeping their following list clean with new tools also presented within a backoffice on the same website.
My situation only allows me to work just a couple of hours a week on a side project. The reason I'm looking for some new ideas to monetize the project a bit more is because I want to buy a new house, like within a year or so. Just need a 100K in euros additionally to buy a nice place to give my son the full experience of life as much as possible in the way me and my wife dream about it. I can't just switch jobs, because the company I work for did alot for me. And I am a v ery loyal person when it comes to people/businesses helping me out with stuff.
Now, for the chat service, its more like a lonely-chat-service. About 100 visitors a day, saying "Hi, is there anyone around here?" or something like that. Then, the silence is killing them at which point they probably start clicking thos e ads :) So as I removed the usefull stuff from the website, people started clicking more on ads, to just get away.
When I read the feedback, I think I should just add some sort of feedback button or create a popup with a textarea in which they can add their dream they expected to get in by entering the website. And then start building them those dream s, for just a penny a day.
As for the 100 visitors saying "Hi, is anyone around here?" The chicken and the egg problem is a very common problem with social sites. The most common way I've seen this solved is by the owners of the site "faking" responses or filling in their site with fake content to look like it is active. They do this just until the site takes off. But it sounds like your project is not that large yet and needs to be built up larger. I'd say for you to keep at it or start another project that you can get more traction in.
For what it's worth... In my experience, only working a couple hours a week on a side project won't get you anywhere fast. I usually spend around 15 on my side projects a week. Otherwise, nothing will get done on them. You just need to make the time. As Gary Vaynerchuk puts it... go to work, go home, kiss the dog, and between 9PM and 1AM you need to crush it.
I wish you the best and hope you can make something happen.
Edit: Here's that keynote where Gary talks about having a side project and working 9-5. https://youtu.be/EhqZ0RU95d4?t=11m50s
But here's another way you can make some money with 3k users: sell something to them. As some have said, things like custom emojis, digital roses, etc, might work. But think outside of the tech box and offer to sell actual physical things e.g. a user could buy flowers for another user and you take care of the service and take a cut out of it.
There's actually a show right now on tv called "Halt and Catch Fire" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/ best show ever about tech imho) and they're trying to grow a startup who's service is a chat service!
The parent made it seem like you had to choose between making money or a good app, which is obviously nonsense.
But I do identify with getting more gratification from solving a problem well and offering to others for free than potentially making money off of it. I might be weird, but money is a drug, and I'll take just what I need (or what my wife says we need).
How specialized are you, maybe if you're incredibly specialized and have the right crowd, you can start having premium accounts, in exchange for special features.
3k is pretty low, for a chat service (in general, maybe for extremely specialized services it isn't).
If possible, try to expand your userbase, advertising? Social sharing? Affiliate programs?
The possibilities are endless and you live and die by the specifics of your niche.
Decide if you want to aim for massive, or niche, ads, premium features, freemium?
If you want more specifics, I think you need to be more specific in your question, but then I'll gladly expand.
You probably won't fix that in this thread if you don't share the URL or even enough information about your chat site for people to give educated feedback.
What kind of users are they? Do they chat about everything or is there a theme or geographical niche? What kinds of ads are displaying through adsense? How long did it take you to get to 3k users? Do you feel like it will be hard to get more? Why did you throw up adsense at such low traffic?
Do they chat about everything or is there a theme or geographical niche? > Dutch visitors, 99%. No theme, just a single chatbox, and another one for registered users. Mostly chatting about adult related stuff or searching for men/woman.
What kinds of ads are displaying through adsense? > anything, I took the advice that popped up in google adsense.
How long did it take you to get to 3k users? > took me a few years, but i spent just a few hours a week like half a year to get those monthly 3K.
Do you feel like it will be hard to get more? >Just figuring that out now.
Why did you throw up adsense at such low traffic? > Someone told me I could get $ for throwing adsense on my site and i was wondering how much that would be
Whatever you do I'd try to listen to your users and see exactly what they want. 3,000 users really isn't very many and it would be really easy for them to disappear. Talk to your users, find out why they're using your site/service, keep that in mind when building out your feature set.
Edit: Keep in mind, building out the service and keeping it free is also an option, especially if you enjoy working on and running the site. If you listen to your users and keep improving the product, it's very possible to turn 3K monthly users into 300K. I run an API that has a front end site which gets around 175K monthly hits and brings in about $1300+ (CAD) a month from the ads. The site costs peanuts to run so I'm happy to serve the 35 million API calls for free and fund the project 100% via adsense. It just depends on how far you'd like to scale it and what your users are like.
This advice is coming from someone who has a site doing roughly $5k month from AdSense via 275k+ visitors / 1.3M+ pageviews and it makes up about 30% of the site's revenue. Rest is from paid plans & affiliate marketing.
It is a nice challenge and you'll learn a lot.
As others have pointed out, without knowing more about your site it's difficult to answer. But some suggestions. Try selling add-ons such as premium emojis or avatars. Look towards a premium account with added features as well.
Partner with them on making this more profitable.
Also you can ask for Bitcoin / Litecoin donations depending on how technical your visitors are. I know you want normal currency, but you can convert BTC using Coinbase and other exchanges
