Hi all, just joined so pardon my noobness but I speak from experience the tiny bit that I have 
I find what Jun said is correct. I believe that he is right and so are others who say they can make it with adsense. Like real world, what kind of business you have decides what system you can or cannot follow, every business has target market. If you have a site that is visited by internet savvy people (like webmasters, programmers) etc you will get nothing for adsense. I hade 1000 visits or 5000 pageviews a day and i barely made 1$ a month on adsense. So I went for Adbrite (even worse >.<)
Yes adsense is less work but it can be more work if you want to do it right. For example a bad placement might have cost me 30$ a week for 3 years till I read a good tip and tried it. So yes like Jun said, I feel sorry for myself.
CPA is awesome. The payout ranges in double digits. But its even MORE hardwork than adsense if you’re starting out. However if you have niche and good visitor loyalty I can tell you , you can make a real living if you get your partners right. (offer products that complement what your visitors expect from your site).
I also know of some people who have nothing but a single HTML page and work with CPA + advertising. You see all of us trying to make a scratch as publishers realize that the money isn’t enough. Have you thought of it from the advertiser’s perspective? So much traffic, so cheap.
Adsense gives you a good feeling everyday with its trickles of cents and pennies yes. CPA looks disappointing when you see it week after week with zero results.
But I can tell you this. With CPA and JV type of income , just a few conversions will shoot you ahead of every ad network income you can think of. One day you will see you have few CPA leads and you will not bother with any Ad network as publisher. You will instead be on the other side (Advertiser).
I learned through years of mistakes >.< Just like Jun says. No small amount too. I want to share my mistakes, complete with details with everyone. So the industry can improve and small guys can make it, just like WWW was meant to be. Don’t forget this is the same as real world. There is competition, hard work is needed to see the difference and street (erm internetwork?) smarts to beat bigger players. Some of you would know this atleast from publishers perspective, Adbrite pays publishers around 0.01 cents for CPM banners if they can do it.They allow you to set it that low… even 0.00 (auto) But did you know that the minimum bid for the same spot to the advertiser is 10cents. Where does the 9 cents go?
Once I realized I was scrubbing the bottom with Adsense, AdNotsoBright and BLA etc tec, I turned around and became advertiser buying quality traffic for so cheap that sometimes I feel bad myself, but it quickly washes away when the next CPA pays me 50$.
Sorry for my long winded post. My site on this matter is not ready yet so I am Binging your brains here ^^