Small Niche Sites

This is still working, the income per site is not huge, but you can run a lot of them so it adds up.

Adsense is a default monetization method for these sites, but clickbank or other affiliate offers can work too. You just have to build the site with this in mind - so pick a niche that there are offers/products for. Write reviews of those products, stay very relevant, collect emails and build email lists.

Adsense is a no-brainer method so to speak, but if done in the right way, affiliate products can make you more $ - it's just gonna take more time and requires better planning.

 

The original idea behind the google algo was to treat each page separately, that's why you can influence your rankings even with internal linking. Obviously, they give more weight to complex sites, treating them as brands and authorities. But, they are not likely to stop sending traffic to a site just because it's not a monster in terms of amount of pages.

Your concern should be more about adsense than google SE itself. Adsense doesn't endorse the creation of MFA (Made For Adsense) sites, so if a reviewer checks out your sites and thinks it's only made for adsense, they might reject it and ban your account. And obviously, small sites with 10 or less pages are more endangered in this context. So I would vote for making bigger sites for sure.