martinibuster - 2:54 pm on Aug 7, 2012 (gmt 0)

...if you make $1,000 a month from Adsense, your traffic is really worth around 10 xs or $10,000 if you took the time to monetize it yourself.

Not necessarily. As previously stated by others, affiliate won't work as well unless it's in a contextually relevant spot with an audience that's vising your site with a credit card more or less nearby. In other words, they are close to clicking the buy now button on a purchase and they just need a reason to do it. One of the affiliate marketing scenarios is to cultivate site visitors who want to buy a specific product and then provide them with the reason to make the purchase, to give them the OK to go ahead and buy it.

The affiliate model calls for a page created specifically for attracting a specific visitor (on the review cycle for a specific product or a newb trying to do better in their hobby for example) via search (think keyword ranking) or inbound links from a specific context. It is amazing how high the conversion rate can go with an exact match URL and an exact match content added to an affiliate link that exactly matches the context. A specific visitor is cultivated. Next the landing page is created, which can be a funnel with a hard or soft marketing message, depending on the product etc. That's a lot of work.

AdSense allows web publishers to monetize space that hasn't been cultivated to such a degree. It's the context and cultivation that determines how well AdSense or Affiliate works. A $1,000 AdSense check may be exactly what that traffic is worth because it won't necessarily earn that much with affiliate links.

As I posted in the post about How to Earn More With AdSense [webmasterworld.com] that's stickied to the top of this forum, if you want to be a success with AdSense, do yourself a favor and research the Affiliate Forum [webmasterworld.com] to get your mind around how site visitors can be cultivated to convert. Failure to understand how site visitors convert, failure to understand what contexts are conducive to conversions is often what is to blame with an underperforming AdSense ad unit. This might be a "new reality" for the OP but it has been the actual reality since before AdSense existed.