Sleepyblogger has a post up where she advocates use of affiliate programs over Adsense. While I have had some success with very targeted affiliate programs, I think that Adsense and YPN can be the best solution for many sites.

Drawbacks to Affiliate Programs:

1. Your audience may not match up well for making purchases online. For example, my friends who run Kiwibox.com, a site for teens, would not make much running affiliate programs where you get paid when a user purchases something. Yes, there are some affiliate programs that pay upon registration or other non-purchase activities, but these have become increasingly rare.
2. You are dependent upon the merchant and the effectiveness of their site. Even if you drive lots of traffic to a site, if a merchant’s site is not intuitive or slow, you will be the one to pay for it.
3. A click can be more accurately measured than a purchase. Although most affiliate programs use cookies to track returning visitors, you may not receive proper credit from a sale if the user returns to the site to make a purchase after the cookie’s expiration date. Or the visitor could make a purchase offline, and you would not be compensated.

I look forward to reading the rest of SleepyBlogger’s affiliate program series, and learning more from her success with affiliate programs.