adult affiliate marketing tactics changed completely

Same thing, only different

With so much crap out there, what do you expect?

It's just how it is. You have to follow the traffic. Unfortunately Google has helped to push a lot of the traffic to a core of sites both mainstream and adult.

You can still manage without spamming but it helps to dirty your hat at least a little bit. ;)

There is a whole mix of issues in the pot which I am not going to get into but a big thing is also the dwindling value of a visitor. This has made many strategies no longer viable. For example with very small micro-niches where maybe 10,000 people online might be interested in total you are screwed if a large pool of content is freely available elsewhere such as on tubes, forums or filelockers. There were so few who would buy before already and now it's even worse because many of those people won't buy now because it's available for free elsewhere. With a small micro-niche site you can't sell thousands of clicks to brokers either because the traffic just doesn't exist. It's nto liek "Teens" or "big boobs" where millions of people online are into that. So there is no way to monetize once the niche gets "screwed" in this way. It's done and you have to shift.