The person selling is doing so because he is getting more for it then he could if he used it himself in almost all cases. And don't give me the "well they just generate traffic to their sites they don't know how to promote sponsors or whatever, so they sell it". That is about 90% BS. How do they sell it? Either through clicks, skim, banners, text links, 404 etc... So they know "how" to send the traffic they just send it to Buyer A instead of Sponsor A. Generating the traffic is the hard part, getting the person to click the link for the ad or to go to your site in the first place. Who you send it to is easy, you just need to try a lot of sponsors out and use your aff code vs putting in the code so you can sell the traffic. One is not any harder than the other and easy for a site owner to do. So OBVIOUSLY, if they selling the traffic they doing that because they make more from selling it then they can as an affiliate. Not to mention when they sell it they are even losing money on broker fees. (all of you guys posting in this thread who take a cut) So they have to sell it for a good bit more then they could make sending it to a sponsor.
So if you are an affiliate your chances of using brokered traffic and turning a profit are pretty much nill. Now if you own a program, then you profit margin is better you have a better chance of turning a profit, likely a small one.
The traffic is going to always be priced higher then the broker could make from sending it to a sponsor himself. If the traffic is actually good quality then its price is going to go up as more people are going to want it. Either way, your % of profit is going to be slim, if you can even manage to turn a profit from it at all. Ideally most people use it for feeder traffic, but what happens with that is it's much much harder to track true sales, and most people using feed traffic are just looking to build up a site and know they going to lose money getting it going initially.
The bottom line is, if broker's traffic was great and people were doing well with it then they would never (or hardly ever) have any available to sell. If I find a source that is making me money, I tell them i want everything they have to sell and I will buy it all. Why wouldn't anyone do this? Why do these guys ALWAYS have traffic available to sell.... because everyone who used it before them lost money on the deal... seems like common sense, if just one person before you who used it was making a profit on it, then why in hell would they ever stop buying it ???
I've always done my best going to sites directly, that weren't selling traffic and working deals out with them directly, it's still hit or miss but some times people will under value their traffic and you can get a good deal and no one else has locked it up yet, then you got lucky. Also, like in my case since I promote a sponsor who pays on tiers I could be making a lot more than the site owner is with his cam sponsor, or maybe he is promoting bad ones and hasn't tested a lot of them yet and I can do better with mine. It happens, when you deal with people who never sold traffic before and you approach them and get virgin traffic. Not to mention when you deal with them directly, you cutting out the middle man and that extra expense
BUT Being the 100th person in line with a broker, and getting extra sloppy seconds, what do you expect to make bank where everyone else couldn't off of it??? You better be selling some pretty great shit that no one else has access to.