Here’s my answer:

well a good opt in list really helps, but I make money every day from web sites that don’t collect email addresses.
For instance, I’ve made $105.56 in the past week selling health books from a little diet site I did a year or so ago. It’s not a lot, but with hundreds of sites money soon adds up.

I’ve also got an auto generated site (250 pages approx) xzxzxzxzxz.com that currently pulls in over $200 a week from Adsense - it’s earned almost that amount for many months now - and it’s not even listed in google and yahoo, just msn. Today it made $38.40. It does well because lots of sites on the same subject have linked to it.