Good question and to be honest, its going to depend on what the companies business model will be when it comes to whether they go for quantity or quality of sites.

When companies go for quantity of sites, they can pretty much figure out that they need to make X amount of sales from their console chain to pay X amount of affiliates X amount of dollars per sale then, they take into account upsells and the likes inside the members areas as well as, in some cases, cross sells on the join pages themselves.

However, when they go for quality of sites, paying out a $30 or $35 per sale on a site that converts AND retains members actually makes the affiliate program more long term revenues, even if a member stays for 3 months @ 29.99 per month for example, that works out to 89.97 in revenue (not including upsells or processing fees) of which 35 gets paid to an affiliate leaving a 3 month profit of 54.97.

Now take into account the amount of additional traffic that affiliates will send to a program utilizing the PPS business model and that should give you some idea of how QUALITY sites make the program money.

Basically, if you have even 3 months of sales stats you should be able to work out how much you are paying out of pocket (hosting, content, etc), how much you are making and, ultimately, how much you pay out the affiliate at the end of each sale.

Also, dont forget that many programs now offer BOTH revshare and PPS business models, this will mean that the revshare affiliates will also be growing the pot to pay out the PPS affiliates somewhat also

Regards,

Lee