Mind you, I am only responding to this gay as question because of the T&A. I respect you at least for paying attention that much. It's a real hideous bitch that "the consequences will never be the same" is too long to fit in the user title, but c'est la vie.
An answer:
Having done tons of PPC and organic, my own results heavily weight PPC in the cases of "trending demand" products and services that pay an immediate and decent-sized commission per sale.
I wouldn't spend money on AdWords for a $.50 zip submit, not because there's anything wrong with it but because scaling up a campaign along those kinds of offers takes a lot more focus and effort than I'm willing to input.
I wouldn't spend money on an offer that paid me a small recurring commission, or on any kind of offer that was in a business that generally had a high rate of consumer chargebacks and/or advertiser scrubbing. It is possible/probable that people with more experience and bigger bankrolls than I have are able to work around the consumer/scrubbing limiting factors, but for me it's just too many externalities that can effect ROI.
I would spend money on an offer in some kind of field that was getting a lot of press lately, where authority and/or news sites were hogging up all the SERPs but the search volumes were big and rising. I would want to see individual per-event commissions in the two-digit range and a stable provider on the other end of the ad. I see opportunities like that the same way I see a formulaic stock trade -- I'm not in it to make massive % returns, I'm in it to make quick returns, and if I want to scale it I do it short term by just buying more clicks, not by fucking around and expanding into other horizontal offers.
For me this works because my content-driven, search engine-loved sites get plenty of traffic on their own, and I don't need to worry too much with paid promotion
in certain niches because of the footprints that I have in them. But if I'm out of my established areas, and I'm promoting something that is riding a news trend, then I need to get in and out as quickly as possible, and the only way to really do that is to skip the foreplay and buy my way to the front page.
The flip side to that, the organic traffic sites, are my little-engines-that-could sites that just churn out numbers day in and day out. Sometimes one or two of them have a huge day, and that's fun but I don't really give a fuck about day-to-day numbers. As long as traffic and rev tick up over the long term I'm happy and keep on investing and building on the successes (the Japanese business concept of
kaizen is something with which every marketer should be familiar, but most do not seem to be.)
You can do much longer-term testing without nearly as much risk with organic traffic sources, and over time this can add up to very decent money, but it takes time, work and foresight to build a network of serious content/ug sites that will produce income for you. You can make massive short-term bank with the right PPC campaign but it's like babysitting Bebe's Kids if you keep it running, and you're taking an upfront financial risk that can get pretty hairy. I would be very suprised if over the long run, people who are definitively successful with either method as their primary means of promotion average greater income than those who are definitively successful with the other.
Frank
... Craziness.
You can make profit here and there, but if you want floods of targeted paid traffic it becomes not that cheap if you use 2nd tier and below networks cause of mainly bidding systems
