The affiliate marketing sure has changed in the past eight years. Yes, it is hard for small startups to compete with the big boys and from personal experience, I would not try to compete with their payouts.

To be honest, there is going to become a point in time, when the big companies are going to have to stop paying suc higher numbers because lets face it $5.00/month hosting paid for two years doesn't event get you to pay the affiliates. You need a customer to prepay 3 years.

The three year prepay brings in $180.00. Then you take $120.00 to the affiliate and then your left with $60.00 to pay for servers, space, tech people, etc. It's not long term practical.

If you were a startup with a fund for $10,000.00 worth of affiliate payout marketing, you could grow very quickly. You would have to go in the understanding that, you might not gain this money back and plan to lose it all.

Depending on what type of product, I like to see clients range anywhere between a $60.00 cost to acquire share hosting, $90.00 for Resellers/VPSes, and then in the $200.00 - 300.00 range for dedicated servers.

With a $10,000.00 affiliate budget you should be able to acquire 100 - 150 shared clients.