I wrote this to generate ads on my blog. It's a lazy Sunday morning hack, finished before 10am, and that includes all the time I spent tweaking the ad text and choosing the sites to link to.
The way to use it is simple: choose affiliate programs to promote, write an ad, and hard-code all the data in the generator script. (Obviously there are more elegant ways to do that part, but this is still less than 50 lines of code.) Run the generator script, and then copy/paste the output into a widget in the sidebar on your blog. Boom, you have ads.
Now instead of Google paying you three cents every time somebody clicks a link, you have some independent business paying you $20 or $50 every time somebody buys something. The win here isn't just the money, it's also the ethics. You were supporting a corporation; now you're supporting independent business. You were selling meaningless clicks; now you're bringing someone actual customers. It doesn't hurt that the earnings potential is orders of magnitude better, but the win is pure ethics win.