I would rather work on other sites and building then going through all that. In addition, I have done that and the pain is not worth the money or instability.
Maybe if I had a low paying niche, I would do affiliate stuff or my own direct ad sales. I can sell and can round up sales when needed be. But I don't like being a salesman 24?7. I like being a creator and working on future projects as opposed to chasing affiliate offers or checks. In addition, I wouldn't start a website in a low paying niche with the intention of working with Google.
Affiliates are just online salesman for companies who go through other companies to get those products to sell and then they have to rely on the affiliate company to track and not burn them on sales. The facts are that they burn all affiliates daily and especially now in this economy. If I was going to be an affiliate, I would go direct to companies and pick up my checks direct with no middle men or women with their hands in my pot. Yes, Google is in my pot, but they are doing their job damn well at being my salesman so there is no need to divorce when the marriage is great.
Running affiliate ads is hardly more time consuming or complicated than running adsense. "Going through all that" is about as simple as using a line of code instead of or addition to adsense.
I look at doing affiliate sales as being a Lead generator more than a salesman. I have sites where all I do is send customers to someone else, where they either just buy on their own or are closed by professional sales people. I make sites. i don't sell shit. I dont chase affiliate offers. My top paying company has been around longer than Google.
I understand issues with affiliate companies not paying or going under,etc. There are reasons not to go direct, depending on what business you are doing. Sometimes you get better payouts by pooling sales and getting paid at a higher tier per sale.
I use Adsense and affiliates. I try not to put down people doing either, but my experience and outlook is a lot different than the perception of affiliates as well as the reality of most of them. I'm not a "sales person" but I do move what I consider real/essential products with real payouts, that require nothing more than sites/traffic, and I get paid.
For example I sold something the other day that paid me a couple hundred bucks up front plus around a hundred bucks a month for the life of the service. I don't make multiple sales like that daily, but I make them frequently enough that the SPIFFs and residuals add up and have been ongoing for several years. I will make at minimum around $1500 from that sale with an average of 3 times that. Adsense would have paid me around 2 bucks once. If I were a salesman I could make around 4 times the commission. But I am not a salesman. So I focus on making sites and pushing volume to multiple companies and salesman to close, rather than being 1 salesman closing my own pool of leads. Adsense for me ( in this particular niche) is a way of making some pocket change off people leaving the site, but I target buyers in serious niches who are more valuable than the clicks.
I have other shit that's all Adsense, as well. It's probably a good idea not to ignore either, and as I said before I think people tend to have a very narrow view of affiliates as well as Adsense publishers.
