In internet marketing, volume rulez. Or is it?
Prior to 2008 economic crisis (when Americans didn't really care about paying $30 a month for pornsite subscription), some of most successful adult webmasters did operate chain of TGP/MGP websites (you know, websites with lots of thumbnails, 50% of which didn't lead to gallery or video but to similar website).
Most of these TGP/MGP websites had 100,000+ visitors a day. Conversion rate (for adult website subscription) was 1:10,000 (instead of usual 1:500 to 1:1000).
So yes, you have lot's of traffic but you need expensive dedicated servers. In 2008, most of them went bust because conversion rates dropped alot while server costs remained.
In domain industry, some of the big players are buying thousands of expired or TYPO (mistyped) domains a month. They pay $8-10 a year per each domain registration or renewal.
And you know what their business model is about? It's about 20% domain earning more by parking or redirects to advertisers in 1 year than registration/renewal fee is. They are dropping 80% of their fresh domain inventory after 1 year.
Average CPC for some mainstream parked domains is far less than 0,01$. Niche domains with very little traffic can have clicks worth $10.
If Verisign with ICANN approval will raise .COM regfee by 20%, portfolio of some of the biggest domain holders would shrink numerous times.
On other hand, imagine having one domain and getting a $20,000 click. YES, some of the most expensive clicks were up to $20,000.
For example, one was an affiliate click through SEDO, where the visitor bought a PRIVATE JET and domain holder received percentage of sale.
And now to my point. I was somewhat successful spammer (not e-mail spam, different forms) through out my adult life.
And most money I've made was while I wasn't spamming.
Huge amount of spam brought me bread & butter. You can rely tons of traffic will bring you some revenue.
But the most I've made was on individual blogposts and forum comments.
One of my most successful "business" in around 2005 was ONE SINGLE forum comment with guide how to optimize certain traffic arbitrage to MAX.
Instead of 500 referrals on traffic broker websites earning nothing, I gained 3 referrals buying/selling traffic worth $10-30k a day, earning me way more money than those 500 referrals trying to catch a penny.
You can fool thousand people for penny with misleading info. But you will never make as much money as attracting someone worth millions with quality info.