I was think of making a Bans site myself – have you got a link to yours?

First time poster, long time lurker. Anyway I have found that my BANS sites are getting deindexed or loosing there google rank; well the ones without much content on.

However although it doesn’t use RSS/XML to update the sites I think that the old pagerank10 affiliate store script works the best.

- Paul

Contrary to what Jem said a few posts ago, affiliate income is making me a substansial amount. Not enough to quit my job and live in Nice, but enough to make it worthwhile.

…and site5 affiliates have made me about $1300 altogether over about a year, but like you say – not enough to quit your day job. My experience with affiliate linking is that income is unpredictable and unreliable, and on a bad month exactly as I say: piss poor.

My experience is strictly limited to product/service affiliation so you may have hit upon something I’ve not touched. The problem with the way I’ve done it is that – particularly with my site5 affiliate links – once you’ve paid for that service, or once you’ve bought that product, the chances are high you’re not going to buy a new one. At least with ‘real’ advertising (hate it as I do) you’re more likely to provide adverts that are going to be of interest on more than one occasion. Or, like your 50×50 advert things, people are going to pay repeatedly to be featured in one of those spots.

Of course, it goes without saying that any affiliate linking on my site is a strictly “as I can be bothered” and a “products/services I personally recommend” basis. This limits my options and quite likely, reduces the income (but then I do it for fun, not for money). On a site where you don’t feel “responsible” for the recommendation of a purchase, chances are you can get away with better/deeper/more affiliate linking.

Perhaps my previous comment was a little over-generalising, but I still believe that affiliate linking – in comparison to other forms of advertising – has a lower payout “threshold”.

Web 2.0 is also more about the technologies involved with it, the user-generated content.

So no, we aren’t at the end of Web 2.0. Just some people are a little tired of the classic ‘web 2.0′ design.