How many sites, and how many pages?

[Useless]

Originally Posted by HowlingWulf

How long is a piece of string?

As vague as it is, that's probably the best answer here.

You are best off building as many sites on as many domains as you can, whether they be small niche 3-5 page hubs or larger, more generic sites. I'm the kind of guy who likes to take on big sites with hundreds of pages and a jungle of different scripts running it all, but frankly, I'd think the wisest way to begin would be to purchase several domains, all niche-specific. Build a small hub on each one with a nice mixture of photo and rich text content and get a few niche link exchanges on each. Represent a small handful of paysites on each. Keep building in that manner and interlink your small sites. Creating your own network of sites which don't require constant updates or repairs and aren't overly and directly dependent on other people's traffic is best.