I am always reading here how to develop good niche adsense income and also reading never to place all your eggs in one basket. As a result, I figure that if someone wants to truly earn good income with a combination of methods, then they need to totally disregard adsense from their thinking equation initially. This may sound strange - but bear with me. If people want to find a high paying niche they should research alternative forms of advertising before embarking on the site (ie high paying affiliates, text-link advertisers or banner advertisers). Once they have identified a viable area they should look at building a content rich site and ensuring that any choice of other advertising they use will not be against adsense TOS. After the content is done, the affiliates (or other advertising) is set up, it is just a matter of applying adsense to relevant parts of the site and blending etc and then doing the normal promoting and marketing. By reversing your thinking in this way you are actually addressing a different question. Instead of how can I get a high paying niche for google adsense? you are asking How can I maximise revenue from a niche site... this is in effect looking after your own interests by looking at how to maximise your income while not being at the sole mercy of google adsense. No matter what niche you find - if you have an active adsense account and your niche complies with the TOS, then it will be successful (to varying degrees) provided you can break into the traffic for that niche. Hopefully this will help some people take a different approach and generate greater success - (as people did make money from websites before adsense started).
Personally I think adsense monetizes websites that previously had no chance of making money off their website. I do agree that finding a niche is more important than adsense, mainly because any successful website can get money through adsense. So it is about developing a website - and for most people that website is not going to make a quick buck any time soon. Developing a website, links to that website - and resulting: a decent volume of visitors to that website is work that takes years. It may take more time now then it did 5 years ago - because of growth in competition. On the other hand: growth in the amount of visitors may mean that certain niches become viable now, that were getting very few requests a few years back. For instance Myspace is popular partly because there are now so many people online that are web-savvy enough for myspace (which doesn't take a lot of web-savvyness) that weren't online five years ago. So think: elderly people, women, teenagers (the non-geek kind) for niches that may still be open and relatively easy turf to develop something new in.
I beleive that the adsense car will work well when both of it's tyres (niche+traffic) are good. I have a site which have some traffic and gets about 30 clicks daily but the site earns me hardly 1$ for 30 clicks, on the other hand I had site who bearly have 2 or 3 clicks daily sometimes 1 or even 0 but these 2 or 3 clicks earn me atleast $1. So, before building traffic aim your niche
I agree, finding niches is the more important part. And picking winning niches that are profitable, even more important, as we all know the time it takes to put into content development and SEO.