Originally Posted by jayeff

The fact that the programs bring in a lot of money says nothing about the value (or lack of it) to the webmasters who build the sites/galleries. And you are skating over a couple of fairly important issues:

The first is that some of the time you used to be able to spend earning money from another source (or driving extra traffic to your AVS), now has to go into replacing the traffic you used to get for free. And unless something has changed dramatically in the last year or two, the AVS operators take the same 45%-50% commission as when they did provide tons of traffic. Effectively you get paid nothing for that extra work and time you must now spend.

Although traffic to the major links lists has been declining over recent years (check Alexa), the number of sites listed has grown enormously, largely thanks to the script-generated sites which now account for the majority of submissions over. The program operators have also put endless traffic leaks onto their links lists: with the combined effect that an individual site is now lucky to see double-digit daily traffic into its member area. So until 1999 you could reasonably double your membership income with upsells, but by 2003 you were lucky to be making 10% extra. I don't imagine that has improved.

Despite all that, obviously old-school AVS does still work for some people. But if you are going to be learning from scratch and don't want to mass-produce sites, the new-style video-AEN programs require similar skills and are a much better deal. They offer broadly similar terms and they are arguably easier to sell. Video is increasingly popular and it is easier to be truthful and direct about what you are offering. By their nature AEN networks have built-in quality control (something AVS operators were still shying away from last time I looked) so their retention is good, and on top of all that, they provide the content (unless you want to use your own) and the hosting for free. In short, if you can do AVS, you can do AEN, and you would have to try really hard not to produce a better bottom line from the latter.