Adsense or CPA?

What do you mean? If I started today IM what would be my monetization strategy?

I don't care how to monetize a website, what I care about is to understand in which market/niche I want to be, then I want to understand my market, then I want to understand how I can bring the traffic, and then I ask myself how much this traffic worth... if all answers are good I will start creating this project...

After it is created I will need to do lots of split tests, the major one will be on monetization methods.

So I will not pick CPA or Adsense, I will probably will try them both (and some other stuff) and then decide.

And if to summarize all this long reply into one word:
testing.

Well thanks Ender,

I understand that tweaking and testing is a big part of the process, but I guess the question is directed to those who tried both and which (CPA or Adsense) worked best for them.

If you are starting out with very limited financial resources, then I recommend starting with adsense because you will have one variable less to monitor (at least intensly) and because of the quicker gratification side that will motivate you and make you realize that you CAN make money online (seeing your first $1 is huge in terms of motivation not to talk about the first check ).

You would just have to concentrate on driving organic traffic and master it in the process. When you will be getting considerable amounts of traffic, then start experimenting with other monetization methods because you will have enough traffic to draw relevant conclusions in a short time span.

Skills like basic copywriting and understanding of tracking and optimization are needed to turn profit from cpa and affiliate products... and you will not see an immediate result which would be ok if you are a realistic and patient person.

Most MMO folks unfortunately aren't and get quickly discouraged and then jump to the next big thing and that's why they don't see results.

All you will ever need to make money online are 2 skills: Drive traffic, and convert it.
The more things you will try to learn at once the harder it will be for you to get a grasp of them and the intenser the "I feel overwhelmed"-syndrome will strike.

That's why I say start with adsense, because you will learn how to drive organic traffic (one of the free ways)... and then tackle conversion.

Hope I could help,
Houcem

Don't have to choose. You can do both. Why limit yourself that's some strange thinking.

Adsense was big in 2005, 2006 but now everyone is doing CPA.

However, if I had a website with 100,000 uniques a day, I would not mind slapping Adsense on that site

Every penny counts in IM..