Firstly, let me clarify. This case study simply show only Dating offer not converting for Pop traffic for Los Pollos Dating Smartlink. And to be fair, I am making quite a good decent revenue from pop traffic with Propellerads. But the offer that is converting well with good profit is certainly not dating vertical. Paid traffic makes up about 90% of my revenue for affiliate marketing leg of business for now. I am also getting sales conversion from paid traffic. So not all of their traffic are bot.
I agree to a certain extend that 'free traffic' or none incent traffic is good. The only issue is that it takes time and money to build them. You need good contents to attract eyeballs, an initial advertising push with a hope that it will go viral or if you want to go full blackhat, lots of proxies, botting, etc. All of these cost money. Even if you use the torrent method to get free traffic, you will still need to invest a lot of time or into a bot to do the heavy lifting of work.
I do have another leg of business that is using the free traffic model by utilizing AI content generation on a blog. And so far, it is generating some traffic, but not really in a profitable range yet. But this should be another different case study to talk about in a separate thread.
In conclusion, i screwed up badly with this case study and take my loss.