Good thread Neo.
My
female celebrities website makes a decent sum for not selling anything and this is all through AdSense. Without getting into specifics, I'll just say that Google sends me a payment every month, simply saying that I get over the $100 USD needed for a payment.
I'd run affiliate program type ads on the site for the first year and made nearly zilch. I started with AdSense at the end of February of this year (2005) and I made more in the first full month with this than I did the entire previous year running affiliate ads.
I wish that my genre of site was a bigger pull for AdWords advertisers because I am averaging nearly 10K visitors a day and well over 1 million page views a month. However, entertainment and celebrities are not high paying ads for starters, and secondly; the demographical market coming to my site are looking for free stuff, information and pictures, so the CTR is also low.