Originally Posted by After Shock Media

I unlike many others can take on a fairly large share of free content on the net. I know when I refurbished my content site one night after being fed up with customer demands I figured I would just give my content away with no strings attached instead of selling it. I figured I could make up my money in referrals and advertising which I more than did. Though at that time most sponsors and there was not a lot did not have free content and if they did even the big boys (BA aside) had maybe 2-4 fifteen picture sets for webmasters to share. As you could imagine nobody would list these galleries or free sites people submitted since it was the same old content they had seen a few hundred times. So naturally affiliates had to actually purchase content to promote sites and there was a good chance that any particular model you purchased would never be in the site anyways. So in a way I helped open up Pandora's box. Yet if it was not me it would of been others and others very soon.

Since besides BA other sites were starting to really go exclusive and they realized that purchased material just could not be used to well and then others would buy any sets you would buy just so that they could at very least have the content you were hawking.

Promotional items aside though we had honest TGP's, Top lists, Free Sites, and then of course Circle Jerks. Rarely if ever was a TGP also a CJ. Even back then though people would proclaim TGP traffic was garbage traffic and freeloaders as they converted at like 1:1000 or worse while a free site would often convert at 1:50 to 1:100. Then CJ's were primarily used to abuse PPC sponsors. Honest to gawd you would have to make about thirty clicks to even find a damn picture of a naked chick, usually you would give up and click a banner or accidentally click the wrong text link and end up at a paysite.

Very rarely though did people ogle over the number of daily visitors. Sure there was some rivalries between assorted large TGP and Link List sites but it was nothing more really than a board ego boost. All the affiliates cared about was getting listed, paying for the content they had purchased and often paying for our outlandos bandwidth charges or if you were new making enough off of your free hosted sites without loosing most of your traffic to your host.

As others have also stated the barrier of entry into this business was to low and growing even lower. Early on you were lucky to get under 8.00 a gig, 70.00 domain names, and 1-3 bucks each per picture. So one gallery could be 45.00 plus the domain and bandwidth in the red from the second you put it up. Yet every Christmas we would see a new flock of webmasters who got their x-mass PC and was ready to become a porn mogul.

We all have plenty of mistakes as an industry yet our largest is the amount of material we give out and host for free, and of course out of program owners greed who want as many affiliates as they can get and keep recruiting anyone who will click some links. Since the only barrier now is a couple hundred dollar PC or even less if you use an older one.