Thanks for the question (it's a good one).
Your comment about not seeing too many ads on TechSpot made my day. That's no coincidence. I personally make sure our user experience is the best it can be, while showing ads and running a healthy business. It's a balancing act.
Although we don't generally measure revenue per visitor, I'll give you a straightforward answer: if only a portion of TechSpot's 8+ million monthly visitors would pay for a subscription, yes, we could make a lot more money.
TechSpot Elite has yet to formally launch, although it's been ready and fully functional for quite some time. We've had it on stealth mode and some members have somehow found it and subscribed. Only recently we added the Elite badges which makes it all the more obvious.
Once we launch Elite, our approach will be to let readers know all content will remain free (no paywall), but this will be a way to contribute to our efforts, the site will be faster with no ads, and all income will go towards developing more content.
Today most of TechSpot's revenue comes from advertising and a smaller portion from affiliate commissions. Around 30% of our readers are ad blocking today, which is a threat to our business model, but we are not panicking about it... yet.
Ultimately our intention with Elite is to foster participation and engagement from our readers. Those who like to ad block, have the alternative to do so without penalizing us in the process.
We have a few exciting things planned for 2020 (dark mode, Amazon price history, faster downloads, more content!) and Elite has the potential to give us the necessary push to make them all happen.
