You are not being nosey and trust me I went through these same issues when creating this site. A lot of people think making money on a site is easy, but it is really not. If you are making your site in order to make money, you better be offering some really really really good services otherwise you may want to rethink your deciscion. We have a decent amount of traffic to this site and still are not near to having our hosting covered.
With that said, if you do not have this great service that everyone will be will to pay money for, be sure this site is being done because of one of the following:
- You have a passion for the topic your site deals with
- You like helping others get free information or help.
- It is fun!
Now to your original question. IF you are not selling a service, then the only way to make money on a site it use advertising. There are a ton of different advertisers out there to choose from. Some are hated more than others.
We use Google AdSense here. You can see the banners for the ads on all our pages either on the top of the page or on the sides of the page. There are other types of ad services out there though. Do a search on it you cant miss it.
Hope that helped to take away some of the questions or concerns you may have had. Feel free to ask more and I will answer if I can, just remember I am still new to this as well