Good points, but I feel you somewhat missed the point with affiliate networks,
Networks facilitate cash flow and provide easy entry.
Most dating site owners have to facilitate the "girls" on the site, often paid girls in some office or working from home who speak the local language.
The dating sites that pay a decent amount almost always have the same setup, where there are a whole bunch of fake profiles, girls, or even guys to message the users on those sites to get them to spend their money on stupid upgrades, messages, and so on.
While some "Advertisers
Come and go with a low budget, not willing to wait a year for retention on their spend, there were some REALLY good advertisers that covered the payroll, handled the staffing & willing to put their money on the line for affiliates sending thousands of signups, which obviously could take a full year to see that money back.
If you kept on running with networks, never decided to meet up with these guys and become direct partners, I certainly agree with you...
But if you did that, you would quickly learn that these partnerships run much deeper than a few sales daily or hundreds of signups.
- You don't deal with staff
- You don't deal with fronting cash flow
- You don't deal with paying salaries and so on
When you do go out of your way to meet up, test different offers & find partnerships in them, you might have found some solid business with much better pay.
I wasn't big on dating stuff myself but know some friends of mine who quickly partnered up, decided to run on Hyrbird models, so actually earning a good % of what the owners of the dating sites did, build out new sites together by working as partners where they could advice what they needed for their traffic while communication how the backend for the owners should work out as well.
I think the above example truly counts for anything.
If you are running a simple course, without a call center in the backend, and no real backend structure, it's very easy to just clone it and run it yourself which counts for LOADS of let's say Clickbank products but some "courses" have REAL trained people on call, following up, chasing leads & handling payment processing for even the hardest cards etc etc
It's not as black and white as you make it seem.
But 1000% agree with Networks and even a lot of "Offer owners, or as I call them, Advertisers, have little to no clue how expensive and what it actually takes to deliver leads and sales nowadays but that's one thing about affiliate networks, they've got a thousand other advertisers you can choose from.
At the same time, there are some very amazing advertisers that maybe put a very basic cost per lead or CPA, but are very much willing to x10 that payout when you start working together and explain your side of things a little bit.
Almost every good affiliate has their payment increased in a matter of a week of running traffic, or sometimes faster.
It's not always about finding the better payout on a different network, but making sure they know you can move, stop traffic, stop their volume, so they decide to work with you on finding a partnership beneficial to both parties.
Just me 2 cents.