Hi Ya'll
Link list traffic is dead unless you're a LL whore and I've seen many of them since I've returned as an "active" builder of sites.
You cannot rely on the link list for sales, unless of course you're upselling to a premium avs site that recurs, you'd use feeders to keep it well advertised on the new sites list through the feeder sites.
Free hosting - I suppose that would be important to some, but not to me
Free Content - There's too much of that out there anyway, content is cheap. Buy some or buy a camera and shoot it yourself. I bought some domains and avs sites from a youngster and he had 6GB of sponsor content on those sites, ONE sponsor. That was enough for this kid to crank out over 1500 avs sites. Content bought = $0 WAY TO MUCH free content.
If you're going to keep the AVS members happy a goodly amount of leased premium content or feeds you produce yourself would help naturally. Downloadable mpegs are very popular (Thanks Movie Posts! Fuckers!)
$ per sale - That's a nice perk, yes.
Conversion ratio - A strong closing pitch by the avs itself is pretty important.
support - Always helps to have non dumb asses as reviewers
But, you've forgotten an important issue.
Let the webmaster make money. Rules such as number of banners, no consoles, no blind links, etc on a measely 40-60 picture site is moronic. I understand the differences that had to be made between AVS and FREE SIGNUP AVS to make Visa happy, but for cripes sake. Let the webmaster make money.
However, in this day and age, I wouldn't recommend getting into AVS if you don't have an understanding of how it's evolved.