Every project I build dies at the same step, what should i do?

Been building things online for a few years now. A couple of games, and for a while now a website. Every single time it's the same story: the building part goes fine, and then I walk straight into the wall of "ok, but how does anyone actually find this". Where I'm at right now: * About 45k pages indexed in Google. Search sends me 0-4 clicks a day. Was before 10-100 clicks but quick drop after i have some problem with site due to AI crawlers. * Had to remove a big chunk of pages for policy reasons and lost roughly 40% of my clicks overnight. Turns out most of my traffic was on stuff I never wanted the site to be about. * Applied to AdSense three times. Rejected three times, last one was "low value content". * Launched on Product Hunt. 6 upvotes all comments positive all very like site and then complete silence. * Doing short vertical videos on YouTube and TikTok for a few weeks now. YouTube gets some views around 1k - 2k and maybe couple visitor on site. TikTok full zero, every time 200-800 views and stop. So here are my options as I see them, and I'd love for someone to tell me I'm reading this wrong: **Paid ads.** Expensive, and from what I've seen most of the money just gone before you already know exactly who your buyer is. But for a project like mine it doesn't even work. The site is free and makes its money from ads itself, so every visitor I pay, costs me more than they will ever bring back in ad revenue. Buying traffic only makes sense when you have something to sell, and I don't. **SEO / organic.** Slow, and for anything actually worth ranking for, the top of the page belongs to big sites I'm never outranking. On top of that AI answers now eat a big share of the clicks that used to go to smaller sites. **Social / YouTube / TikTok.** Probably the most realistic option left, but trying to go viral honestly feels like buying lottery tickets. Maybe I'm missing something obvious. Maybe this is just what it looks like now and everyone who "made it" started five years earlier than me. I genuinely don't know, so that is why I'm asking. I just want to hear from people who actually run something online, doesn't matter if it's a SaaS, a content site, an app, a game, ecommerce or a service: 1. If you run a free site that lives on ads: where does your traffic actually come from, and did it ever start paying off? This is the one I care about most, because everything I read about growth assumes you have a paid product. 2. Did you build an audience first and the product second, or the other way around? 3. If you had to start from zero today with no ad budget, where would you put your time? 4. How did you get your first 100 users? What actually work and what was a complete waste of months? Failure stories welcome, maybe more than the success ones. And if you think my whole read on this is wrong, say that too, I'd rather hear it now than after another year.