With some startups it's hard to distinguish between the two to be honest. I almost feel like the way the media covers startups they are a "get rich quick scheme". What percentage have a successful exit? I don't know. I did hit the startup lottery once as a late hire and got about $8k from the acquisition.
However, I do agree I would have better spent those years thinking about how I could solve people's problems instead preying on their insecurities.
I think what people here are saying is that given the obvious level of effort you (I assume you're the author) put into this, you could have put serious dents in a few patio11/rob walling style saas or other small product businesses. I understand there's money to be made chasing various arbitrages in online advertising, but those get plugged over time. Plus a product business would make me feel better about what I spend all day doing.
Walling's book start small, stay small may help you get started. Amy Hoy talks about this a bunch; she runs a paid course but also has a ton of free content. You should check them out.
I've also read about people making serious money from advertising; it seems like the time investment to understand all that stuff is big enough that it could help you understand a small business instead.
I've gone through 30x500 which is kind of what shifted my focus to products. I haven't really taken any action with that yet though but it seems to work for some others.
I dunno, just from reading your blog post I think you showed you have a lot of ingenuity, intelligence, passion, and perseverance- add some good product sense and you have yourself a decent web startup.
Let's separate get-rich-quick from the actual process of making affiliate campaigns, testing and scaling them.
Here's some stats (top-level, very approximate) from my own experience:
* Number of campaigns created & stage 1 testing: 500+
* % to stage 2: ~25%
* % from stage 1 to 2: 20%
* % from stage 2 to "success": ~50%
In the end, I'd say that roughly 5% of my affiliate campaigns were successful. Success is defined as eventually returning the test budget * 4.
The key was that if I got a campaign to stage 2 I had a very high likelihood of profit. Literally 50% of the stage 2 campaigns became successes (most stage 2's broke even close to it).
Of those successful campaigns, only 10% of them generated 90% of my profits on average. The end result is that ~1% of all the campaigns I made made 90% of the profits, which is quite accurate.
Over the span of 7 years of being a full-time affiliate (excluding the part-time years) 12 campaigns were the main money drivers.
However, I do agree I would have better spent those years thinking about how I could solve people's problems instead preying on their insecurities.