Companies doing B2C - how are you doing it?

I've noticed that the vast majority of successful small businesses mentioned on this site (and elsewhere) are B2B. This makes a lot of sense for a variety of reasons, which seem to reduce to: 1) more willingness to pay 2) more ability to pay. Clearly, the safe choice when starting a company is to cater to a business - but I am curious to hear about people working on B2C projects.

Are there any success stories that people could point out? Between subscription and advertising (do people even click on adverts on random websites these day?), what tends to be the better approach? What about affiliate marketing?