More often than not the affiliate programs I worked with on a team dedicated supporters site required work to make them start to pay well enough to justify the time spent promoting it ( suppose it depends on how you value your time as to whether it was worth while ). Way back when the likes of 888.com offered $300 a sign up before they brought in the usage limits was a huge earner.
A good earner back in the day as well from Gambling firms was selling backlinks at xxxx for 6 months but with that obviously came risks, not something id recommend doing now.
Direct adverts were generally better with adsense units for us, the direct ads are hard to keep month on month though as most companies wanting to advertise know they can do it cheaper to a broader audience via an affiliate program or Adsense unless exceptionally targeted to a team related product/service.
Ive always found team specific niches to be poor earners in comparison, at one stage we were churning out 15k unqiues a day with ( time on site being 12 mins average ) and revenue was still crap....at that point dedicated servers were not cheap either like they are now. That said we were community , user generated content rather than a blog so had to worry more about user experience and keeping them happy, so no popups ,popunders etc etc etc.
Blogs in most cases always generate more revenue in a comparison with like for like traffic over a forum.....by a considerable mile.
There is that gulf of difference between what's available when you have reasonable traffic or "huge" traffic. Huge traffic attracts different revenue forms and opportunities which we never reached for that particular site.
