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It depends on volume. It's a sort of economy of scale. If your fixed costs exceed your total revenue then yes you are definitely operating on a loss. Programs have certain fixed costs and if they aren't pulling in enough to cover them then they have surely reached what is called the shutdown point. A program would be foolish to offer affiliates so much that they actually take a loss for each new member added. Again that's not what is happening to most of these people. The problem is that business has died down from it's highs and they aren't doing the same volume as they used to. In spite of this their fixed costs are the same or higher. This makes them approach that dreaded shutdown point.
This is one of the advantages for a percentage based model for your backend (e.g. CCBill minus any Visa fees, etc) if you are a smaller program. It's one less fixed cost you have to worry about. If you had to pay say $1000 for your backend each month but you only did $900 in sales per month it would not make sense to keep operating.
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