I feel your pain. Great idea + no time = other people get paid. Happens to me sometimes, and it sure sucks. Of course, you have to devote your time to something, and there’s no telling what will and won’t succeed until you do it.

@J, it’s not naive…although it does sound like you may have drank a bit too much of JBs Kool-Aid
Certainly the ideal is to control your own customers, but given the costs (in time and money) of developing systems to manage the customers and the costs of finding and recruiting those customers, WHILE you are trying to develop a resource to attract eyeballs to sell to those customers, it may be a better business decision, at least temporarily or with a certain percentage of your visitors, to go for what is easiest and focus on creating your business and having some revenue.
AdSense and selling text link ads allow me to test the market easily. Once I know the market is profitable, it is not hard to start climbing the food chain and gain control of the customers. In fact since I have begun using TLA most of the link sales that I’ve done are private, but TLA helped me establish the price and know that my site was valuable real estate for advertisers.
@Leroy…no pain here. I’m actually very glad they did it. I don’t believe in the expression “no time” (or at least I’m training myself to let go of using it). Time is finite, therefore you cannot have more or less of it; the issue is priorities. I made a conscious decision that this project was not a high priority for me. I actually hoped someone else would do it, so in a way I was able to manifest exactly what I wanted; a key system for my blog network for zero upfront cost.

Hey J, Just a warning, I’ve driven more than a few people crazy by changing my direction on things So drink my Kool-Aid with a grain of salt!
I guess I like to stay open to see both sides of the picture and I usually find out that taking a strong stance makes for good discussion, but there is almost always an opposite point of view that is true, or at least considering.