HN user
Yeah, when I was working on affiliate websites, I created a web framework and then paid people to be researchers for me. I made about $3K over 4 months for each $250 I invested into people doing research for me.
A couple of years ago, I was extremely ill and couldn't work. In my periods of relative lucidity, I was able to hack together websites and make approximately $4K/month, which was enough to live on if you ignored the $8K/month in medical bills.
My experience with them suggested that you needed to go through and do an entire new thing every three months, because that's about the time it would take any efficient scheme to be overwhelmed by other people discovering the efficiency of that scheme.