Originally Posted by wankawonk

have you ever tried setting one up though?

even if you're using a pre-made script like smartCJ or streamrotator it's not easy. The difference between a smartCJ site made by someone who knows what they're doing, and a smartCJ site made by an amateur, is huge. An expert can dominate google with smartCJ. An amateur will probably never make money.

Also, because you need a ton of traffic to make real money, and you usually have a very large database, there can be a lot of technical challenges to solve. My day-to-day life involves things like waking up to a crashed database or disk swapping causing runaway I/O or some crawler from russia is hitting me 10x/second or my grabber broke because the dump format changed or my traffic grew and my server is now at 80% capacity and I have to decide whether to try to make the script more efficient or move to a larger server (which means fully configuring a new server) or maybe even break out the database into multiple servers...

There are times you will literally find me screaming at my laptop "Oh fuck, everything is fucked, I will never recover from this problem"...of course, this is my bread and butter, so I work until I solve the issues. But it can be a very stressful, difficult job.

So I take exception, to the idea that "tube aggregator would be easiest to run"