Does Anyone Have Any Luck With Affiliate Marketing?

On the ABestWeb forum, there are a number of participants who credibly claim to collect more than $10,000 per month in affiliate commissions (although some have offsetting expenses such as PPC search costs). One fellow posted a screen capture showing that he’d earned $100,000 in a single month.
I’ve had success with several programs. Amazon has paid me thousands of dollars through their Associate Program; Google AdSense has paid me a couple thousand dollars in the past few years. One specific program earned me about $25,000 over a couple of holiday seasons; another earned me a steady $1,000 to $1,200 per month for a year.
None of this happens by magic. The revenue comes if you offer a meaningful opportunity that “adds value” for consumers and for the merchant. I’ve done this by creating niche content sites and narrow-themed directories, and also by using PPC (paid search) advertising.
There are tens of thousands of merchants offering affiliate programs; only a thousand or so have any reasonable prospect of earning money for most affiliates, and few affiliates will ever find success with more than a handful of merchants. In any given year, I earn and collect meaningful affiliate commissions from only about one or two dozen merchants. Some of them are the same every year (Amazon is the obvious example) but others come and go. I am currently enrolled as an affiliate in about 2,000 merchant programs (mostly through ShareASale, with a handful of programs through LinkConnector and RedGaloshes, and a few dozen “independent” or “in-house” affiliate programs); only a dozen of those have generated ANY commissions for me this month.