I posted in this thread and voted honestly back then, ever since I've been getting email alerts to come back and read the latest posts in the thread but I haven't for quite some time. Until about 2017 I had a reasonably good outlook for smart affiliates who didn't put all their eggs into one basket, kept up with the latest trends and worked hard, kept learning and basically just took the good with the bad as always, and an opportunity would always present itself if you didn't give up trying. I remember when I first started, I would spend days reading nothing about SEO because that's what I knew would make me money. I was reading all I could and I thought I knew so much, but it turned out that Google had already been released and I was reading how to get an advantage in AltaVista and Lycos and Yahoo Directory and Dmoz (maybe that was later, actually, with Google, but I digress).
I won't end that story there because I ended up doing very well from Google, especially after learning about PageRank, not being particularly mathematically minded made it harder for me than others perhaps, but I got the gist of how it worked and early on, it was quite simply put probably the strongest ranking factor out of maybe 100 or so by a large margin. If I hadn't dedicated myself to learning all of the oudated info about keyword density, keyword stuffing, titles with hundreds of key words and other totally nonsensical ideas today, I may not have ever even tried to master Google. I was determined, not because I'd failed I don't think, I had learned a lot of useful things along the way researching the older search engines as well, but because I had I was just hungry, I think, and determined to not fail.
I found some forums where really clever people gathered and they'd discuss each dance and their theories, never giving away answers, it was kind of like trying to decipher a code in a way, but there were people I learned to trust and those I'd ignore, just like in real life and I'd implement what I'd learn each dance and eventually I saw my rankings getting close to the first page, then up into the top 5 and eventually even the very top position for some really profitable keyphrases in my market. That's another thing I don't see today, the cooperation between people. Everyone seems to be in a more selfish mindset than back when I was learning the ropes, but perhaps that was just who I was helped and mentored by.
I didn't expect the hate and anger that brought upon me. When I was gaining in the top 10, I had friends on my ICQ galore, it never stopped "uh oh"ing, but that's when I learned a hard lesson about life and about the nastier side of SEO, (gosh I wish CoudFlare was around then) my site was DDOS'd constantly and my hosting provider and I had to part ways.
Anyone whose changed hosts knows how painful it usually is. Well, it's more painful when you switch from a Windows to a Linux box (don't ask, it was my first host and I felt I had a loyalty to him since he was only a two man shop himself).
I had a several month long spam email campaign initiated against me, and even though I'm pretty confident I know who the culprit was at the time, he was in a country that wouldn't have done anything about it, so I did the best I could with those spam blockers and tried my best to whether the storm but that was a really rough time in my career.
Just like the old adage, no matter how big you are, there's always someone bigger than you, and like that, no matter how much money you have, there's always someone with a lot more money willing to take you down in order to benefit. Why wouldn't that be the affiliate program if they can get 100% of the sale instead of whatever they have to pay you? I've had that happen to me with an AdWords campaign early on, I'd stupidly sent traffic directly to their landing pages, back when that was allowed. So they were getting the exact keywords that were most profitable and after a month or two they figured why not just outbid me and save having to pay me at all.
I'd suggest it is much harder now than it's probably ever been in many ways, but there's also a shit-ton of new opportunities too, there always is. Finding out how to harness them consistently is what makes the job hard. Then, when that stops working, you have to find something else to consistently milk until that cow runs dry, and so on.
But not impossible to start right now and earn a living as an affiliate - but the primary factors to your success would probably have to do with how much you enjoy what you are trying to do/sell/promote. How long you can work damn long hours for very little, if any return because if you want to build up anything, an email list, a blog audience, a podcast, twitter followers, facebook likes, youtube subscriptions, twitch subs, Patreons willing to pay for your art, or read the millionth casino or poker site review that's been written, then it's going to take a long time to build something from scratch without spending a shitload of money - and I guess it goes without saying, if you had a shitload of money, you wouldn't be looking to get into affiliate marketing, especially in 2019. Damn, I'd have said that probably at least 2015, and maybe not for the first time. If you are looking at casino/poker/gambling - then you at the very least would need something different than the rest of the community. Just having another bestcasinosites.reviewsonline with a stock Wordpress or Joomla template and the same old promise that "this is the damn best online casino in the world, they'll give you free spins and you'll be a millionaire, click here" simply won't work today. You need something different.
In saying that it's possible, I personally wouldn't recommend it, but I've been burned a lot and it hurts, I might not be the type of person who can keep getting kicked in the guts over and over again, and still walking back to get another kick in the guts.
But if that sounds like you, I think tge primary difference between the affiliate programs of the past which could have given you a decent recurring revenue stream and the ones of today are that they're more concentrated in the hands of fewer owners in most industries, purely conjecture on my part but that's how I think it's been heading for a while now and in the industries I have been involved in it's certainly the case.
There's fewer programs and a lesser need for them to need affiliates in order to bring in business. Believe me, once they don't need you, they will kick you out and spit on you on your way out. As well as lesser competition between the few larger companies controlling the majority of the traffic/sales/advertising and their percentage of the pie is smaller than ever before due to big tech companies demanding their share of everything, governments all over the world wanting a cut of everything and those very generous angel investors wanting profits to go up forever.
There are also increasingly costly rules and regulations in many markets which are forcing small, single mom and pop style affiliates and affiliate programs out of the market with only those who have access to a large amount of capital each year for the price of entry and if a business is relying on ever decreasing profits to survive, it's hard to stay in business.
Globalisation has caused a lot of great things for many people, but there's no doubt that it has also hurt some people since a computer engineer in Bombay can bid on work for a company in London and since his cost of living is less than that of many western countries and often his resume and skills are quite comparable, why would a company pay more for labour or a specific task/program/script etc. than they need?
If they are a public company, their shareholders demand more profit. It's also worth noting that in every industry across the internet, the big tech companies are taking their slice of the pie first, before the end user even gets to see the top organic listings on search or social or market place or web store or whatever traffic source you are targeting.
Another thing that has affected me recently and somewhat soured my attitude towards the longevity of small to medium affiliates is that large affiliate programs can and do change their terms and conditions on a whim when they want more money, YouTube is a great recent example that doesn't affect me but affected plenty of others overnight.
Some managed to adapt to YouTube's changes by moving to Twitch, however that seems like jumping from the frying pan into the fire, others managed to remove a lot of previous content and promise overlord YouTube to evermore alter their content substantially for the advertising gods, others still with hugely loyal fans moved to services such as Patreon, which I think is something that could only exist on the internet and is absolutely great for true artists woth enough motivation (being able to eat is usually enough motivation for most people, I suppose), or in the case of some not so savoury characters, I heard that they even now promote themselves on adult webcam sites for money, even though they stay clothed the entire time and do exactly what they did before, flap their mouths with controversial views in order to get attention, just on a different platform.
Adapt or die has been the nature of the beast since the earliest of life, and whether you are on our first company or your fiftieth, I don't think that it's a stretch to find that most people would agree.
I've been around for a long time and due to a domino effect that started from one unfortunate effect, I've lost 10 years of my life and literally almost all of my $xxx,xxx annual income within a few months. Don't think it can't happen to you, this was my other basket too - so when the golden goose died, I still had something to fall back on and concentrate on but I didn't think I'd need to plan for another devastating series of events so quickly, and that is why my personal view on affiliates going on to become millionaires as they have many times over in the past, may be a thing of the past.
Now it seems you need to either be born with absurdly good looks, lucked out into a country not in war but in some super rich family in a major power, or have (pretty boring) sex on a grainy video tape and leak it to the media (although hopefully that one's finally been dealt its death knell thanks to a Mr Hogan and a large group of expensive lawyers backed by someone with a grudge), or just get really, really lucky with a kind of shitty dance and become an insta-famous fashion/backpack wearing idol or some kind of influencer being paid, not unlike affiliates but usually pushing pretty average products to a bunch of young fans who don't really know how the world works yet.
It really does seem to be getting worse for the smaller, individual or independent affiliates, and I think the same can be said for the smaller, individual businesses and workers around the world in general. I've seen PPC come and go and come again, perhaps we'll see some normalcy again, but I have a strange feeling we didn't take the path not travelled, but the timeline that shouldn't have been conceived.
I cut this post in half in an attempt to remove my tangents as to why I think the way things are the way they are, sorry it's still so long. I'm gunna add one last thing.
My final word in this subject is the fact that if you want to own your business, you have to own your customers. There's no point getting millions of visitors to your websites over their lifetime and never once getting any info from your potential clients. If you sell onions, and there's two onion shops in town. Try and at the least get a name and email addres from them before you tell them which Onions are the best to buy, because when a third onion shop opens, you can send them an email saying "Hey! I found some really sweet onions, you should check them out", and if you can keep them on your onion list by giving them tips about onions, what goes good with onions, jokes about onions and even the occasional free onion, they won't think of your email as a spam email, they'll think of you as the online onion dude who gives them onions and had that wicked onion pie recipe. But if you get their email, let it sit in a database for 6 months and then email them, they'll either not open it, think it's spam or unsubscribe because nobody wants to just get sold to in their emails every day.
Take email and apply that to whatever the new thing is and you can do it, but it will be hard. To be honest, you'd be better off setting up your own online store, keeping your own customers to yourself and maybe even starting your own little affiliate program, at least then they can't take away 10 years of your life and hundreds of thousands of dollars because they can. And they do.