Help, Newbie. How many Emails do you need to collect before you start earning?

It depends on how you acquired the emails. If they have signed up through an optin form in your website, then you could start earning from Day #1 --even from your first email.

Affiliate products are a good way to go. However, you need to know if these are quality products, so that your subscribers don't feel they are spammed by another guy who is sending affiliate products. Instead of offering affiliate products, I always prefer to offer my own products --it's not that hard to create your own products.

Depends on who's emails you got. If you got an email list of buyers: 1. If you got a list people who like free stuff, going to need a lot more.

Numbers and math:
How much did it cost you to build your list?
How much can you make from your offer?
And what's your conversion/click-through rate? Lets go with 1% for easy numbers
Example If they buy you get $40. And you have a list of 1,000
1,000 x .01 = 10 people. 10 x $40 = $400 Earned.

The standard is for each email on the list, you should be making 1$ per person per month. Am I making that? no, I'm still near a beginner as well.

Alternates to affiliate products:
Sell your own products. $$$
Sell an email. People want to pay you to be able to send an email to your list. This is known as solo ads.
PayPerAction, These tend to suck, but might work if you got a list of people who like free stuff.
Have I done any of these? Nope, just do affiliate stuff.

Now hopefully someone more qualified than me answers...

As one of the other replies mentioned, you could get sales from the very start, or it could take a hundred or more subscribers and then you get a bunch of sales together.

Affiliate products are a good way to make a living - it means less work for customer support, updating products and so on.

It's worth thinking about putting CPA offers on your Thank You page - even if they pay out just a couple of dollars, it helps with the cost of acquiring your subscribers.

A good funnel with targeted traffic should make you money without any problems.

As has been mentioned earlier, there are a lot of variables to be able to answer your question.

However what I would say is more important, is the fact that you need to start sending emails to your list (no matter how small) straight away.

If you wait until you have 'enough' people on your list, there is a good chance your subscribers will have forgotten about you and therefore unsubscribe.

What you have to remember is that if the offers you promote in your emails are targetted to the interests of the people on your list, there is a chance that with just one person on your list you could possibly make a sale.

Obviously, the more people you have on your list, the better, but don't think you need a certain number to start earning.

So in summary my advice to you would be:
1. start sending emails straight away
2. make sure the offers you promote are closely aligned with the interests of those in your list

I hope this helps and I wish you all the best on your online adventure