How making money online has evolved over the years

Years ago you could get relatively large revenues on pay per click ad programs. It wasn't surprising to get $5 per click for a hot niche like electronics which were able to pay for it because of the large profits they made.

More people realized the money to be made online and competition skyrocketed; as the amount of websites advertising increased, the price per click and per thousand impressions declined.

Webmasters who wanted to make more money found a way. They saw that they could directly advertise products with companies such as clickbank and commission juntion. This required more work to monetize and was not simply just copy and pasting code, but is more efficient than adsense in terms of profit.