[MadCat]

I hate to sound like the Grinch but think carefully before you start anything. I did the same sort of thing a long time ago, except it operated as a collective of webmasters who were all building free sites using a centralised server and a bunch of software I wrote to automate a lot of the "dumb" work (text and submissions still done manually ofcourse).

Everyone would build sites, and the banner space on all sites was shared amongst the "members" of the collective according to how much of the total output of sites (at the time of a banner impression) you generated.

Basically a very communist setup in hindsight

It also worked fine for a few months after which it spectacularly desintegrated due to certain members believing they were getting screwed over on impressions, and demanding to see everyone elses' stats (which basically nobody wanted to do because shit like that was still considered personal info at that time ... still is I hope :P) and there was no convincing them (up to and including having the source for the banner impression code audited by an independent third party) so yeah. It went pretty much the way of the dodo.

Some interesting stats came forward though:
1: Time it took to build a site: give or take 15 minutes
2: Time taken to submit whatever was sitting in the submission pool: 1hr
3: Number of sites built before epic failure: 15103
4: Pageviews/day across all sites: 674045
5: Uniques/day across al sites: info lost *sob*

Income per month varied like a crazy mofo due to the usual jiggling one does with affiliates to find the best one, but stabilised (for me at least) at around $500/mo. This is off a time investment every day of about 2 hours building/submitting stuff. The other 18 hours being spent taking care of said server and software, with 4 hours left for sleep :P

Anyway I sorta hijacked your thread here, sorry Just wanted to show my experiences with doing something "community" wise that backfired in a pretty nasty way.