Just some thoughts...
Even people who need more money or who want to save money are spending money on something. The better you know your market base the easier it's going to be to sell something to them, or at least to know what to try to sell them.
Once you've got to that point you've got to have conditions condusive to making a sale. PTR overall - not looking at individual sites but the entirety of it - isn't really condusive to this. One thousand links a day with 20 ads per page, half or more of them not visible, trying to click to the next link as fast as you can ... nah. How about we settle back on the sofa with a cup of tea or coffee and nice and relaxed and get tempted by the latest chocolate bar, presented to us by people just like us and it looks goooood! Then if you do see something that interests you do you feel safe getting your credit card out to pay for it? I know I don't log into Paypal after starting to click links - if I need to check my PP balance I do that on a clean boot, not in the middle of a clicking session.
To be honest, I don't think many POs care about any of this? They don't really mind if no one's interested in the ads because they are generally quite removed from the ads - they get paid for views, not sales and they aren't marketers so their attitudes are understandable on that level that it's the view (or hit to be more honest) that brings in the money so that's what they're mostly concentrating on.
I always envisioned a site where you could sit back at your computer with a cup of tea or coffee (or other beverage of choice) while taking a break from whatever, and in a relaxed, no-stress way click through some links that were genuinely targeted to your interests, where it's okay to spend half an hour looking at one ad and perhaps feeling convinced that now's the time to buy, or at least bookmark. There's only one site I have ever been a member of that I felt this way about, and it's not considered a "PTR site" per se. And in that site, there was never any pressure to buy ads with them, they had their own sources for ads, and it wasn't the memberbase, I think we tend to get these things confused - what do POs want from their members, and is it realistic or condusive to building whatever they want from a site?
What DO PO's want from a site? Mostly I percieve that they want to build a clicking empire where they and their members make easy money. They need advertisers, on the whole though they've found that 'real' advertisers aren't breaking down their doors so they've turned to the members to be all things to all men in some kind of bring-and-buy sale concept where everyone brings something, everyone takes something. But it's not easy to do that in such a way that it doesn't end up as a ponzi scheme where everyone's a net loser and only a minority make real gains at the expense of someone else who goes home with a white elephant.
Many original concepts of PTR came from the pyramid/ponzi industry in the first place - not from internet marketing. That, I think, is where almost all the problems stem from and almost all the attitudes that are prevalent today are mired in the thinking from those first sites.
Before you can fix anything, I firmly believe that you need to understand what's going on, what the problems are and why they are problems. You cannot get hung up on "stop bashing me-it hurts!!!!" or you won't learn anything and you won't move forwards. When you do something like imposing a click requirement of 50, 100, 200, 10% onto the members, on some level I believe you know there's a problem, even if you don't want anyone to tell you (who wants to be told the blindingly obvious to which they have no solution?) you know there is a problem. When you send that admin mail out saying that you're paying as fast as money comes in, you know there's a problem. When yet another advertising network dumps PTR, you know there's a problem. You can call everyone names until the sun goes down but you know as well as we do that there IS a problem. The sooner we can acknowledge this without just throwing out blame and insults, the sooner we can come up with ideas that might counter some of the problems.
