I think part of the problem also is that so many people put up sponsor ads and then leave them up. Which gives sponsors a supply of traffic, regardless of whether they convert clicks to sales or not. I know some TGPs etc. forbid webmasters from altering galleries once they've been listed. However, if ads that didn't produce sales were removed more often, that would give sponsors more incentive to make their programs convert. I use server side includes for my ads, so I can change all the ads on a domain by editing a handful of text files.

I don't have pop-ups on my main site and like I said, it converts 1:60 to 1:300 on average. So I rarely use a sponsor that has a pop-up. It is very hard to find good gay sponsors these days.

I just had an e-mail correspondence with a video/DVD store. Their solution to the lack of sales over the past six months is for me to send them even more traffic... Ummmm... I really wonder which planet some of these people are on. Why would I send more traffic to a store that can't sell even one $10 DVD (on which I make $2) on 100s of clicks? When the same traffic sent to a streaming video site generates me an average of 60c per click!

Either the affilate side of things is not that imprtant to these companies, or they are hopelessly out of touch with the reality of the situation. Or, as mardigras said, maybe there are just so many foolish webmasters who keep sending good traffic to the bad places?