Short Attention Span Theatre for people with a vocabulary and a net connection.
“Whatever monetization means the blogger in the long tail settled on, be it Google AdSense or Amazon affiliate codes, it can only work on large volumes of traffic. AdSense works for Google because the odds are in its favor - it is aggregating small amounts of traffic across the entire web. The math works for them because it is based on the massive scale of the web. It similarly works reasonably well for the sites with large amounts of traffic, but it fails for smaller publishers who have low visitor counts.”
—

Read/Write Web :: There’s No Money In The Long Tail of the Blogosphere (tumbled from montoya)

Two years ago at this time, I was playing online poker for a living, and during this time I was writing a poker blog. Not a very popular poker blog, even in what would seem like (but really isn’t) a very limited market, but I got a fair amount of traffic and occasional mentions from other more popular poker blogs.

Anyway, towards the end, when our increasing bills were eating into my bankroll slowly but surely, I started adding some affiliate links. Just a few text links here and there for poker and casino sites, rakeback programs, books… no garish flashing banners or blatant shilling, but if I mentioned it and I could get money from a link or a sign-up I gave it a shot.

I knew there was almost no money to be made. At my peak I had maybe 1000 hits per month, and I was even at the end making around $12/hour playing 3/6 limit hold’em.

Technically, this article is correct. Very few indeed will ever make their living writing on the web… or anywhere else, for that matter. But there was one incredible month where I made $20 from affiliate links and sign-up bonuses. Not much, but enough to order pizza. Not a living, but it was one of the best pizzas I ever had.