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A lot more has changed in the market over the last 5 years than just the way you need to sell. Perhaps one reason newcomers complain so much is that their expectations have been raised too far.
These days it sometimes seems like webmasters are exposed to more advertising and promotion than surfers used to see. All of it promising, more or less directly, easy money: a promise few if any can actually deliver on.
Go back 5 years and the money was easy. At the same time, the webmaster "community" was more tightly knit and you didn't need to network much to know which sponsors were hot and which to leave alone.
Actually I answered this because of what you wrote about the need to sell. It's interesting that first we accepted the need to filter and now we are accepting the need to (all but) make the sale. Filtering is a logical thing for traffic sources to be doing, but should we be selling too?
Affiliates may feel the need to do the selling because so many front ends ignore what webmasters tell each other (and sometimes the sponsors themselves tell us!) makes for effective sales. But it's not exactly an efficient way to go. If you take 100 good traffic generators, how many of them realistically are also going to be good salesmen? I'm certainly not and that's the main reason I chose to generate traffic rather than run a paysite or AVS sites. That choice was supposed to let me focus on what I do best.
To that extent, we are doing the exact opposite of what happens in most industries as they mature. Instead of people becoming more specialized, we seem in some respects to be expecting them to become more diverse. And you know what they say about Jacks of all trades...
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