I don't by any means think paysites are not worth getting involved with, but I do think it's much harder to build them into very large profit machines than it was a few years ago. We are planning on launching a new site within the next several months.

Consider the cost of buying or shooting content, paying the Visa fee ($750) at at least one processor (and preferably two), buying a CMS, getting the site designed, and then constantly having to shoot or buy new content and prepare it for updating every week... dealing with customer service issues, etc...it's not an inexpensive or easy undertaking.

The other issue is, there are so many programs out there it's a challenge to get affiliates to promote a sponsor program with only one site.

On the other hand, it's simple to start getting your own traffic and referring it to a dozen or two sites. You get 50% of the revenues you'd get if you operated the program and had affiliates sending you the majority of traffic, but you also have no Visa fees, no CMS, no aggravation with customer issues, and you can actually have better conversion because you have many different options to send your traffic to and can modify and refine what sites you're marketing based on changing conversion patterns.

In short, what I advise new webmasters is to focus on traffic first, learn to develop and use the traffic, and then, once you've become skilled at that, open a website and use your traffic skills to direct traffic to your own site *if* you decide you simply must have your own site.