As one of the creators of the concept and the original webmaster for TGP2.net, the original TGP2 resource site, I feel obliged to say a couple things on the subject.
First of all, yes, the concept failed miserably. There were many reasons, but I think the main one was greed and the continuous backstabbing. At some point, those of us who were more committed simply let it go, once thing was fighting against the "market forces", another fighting against the "market forces" AND the so called committed TGP2ers, specially a few of the leaders.
On top of that, several programs promised to support this movement in different ways, some of them even made press releases. I'm still waiting for their so called "support" to a movement that... tried to help them (go figure). Of course, all of them are gone, but who's counting?
Finally, about the "cartel" thing. Yes, OK, it was some kind of cartel or whatever you want to call it. But those of us who were in this business for loooooong years and knew how the story was, it was a logical procedure: every single step, innovation or groundbreaking idea was "leveraged" by law or the industry as a whole or, like you call them, the "cartels". Let me give you some examples:
- before The Hun got mega rich and became a class act, The Hun was like any kind of pirate or password trading site. It grew that big because he was the worst offending site between a small handful. The existing paysites joined forces to make him (and a few more) stop and the rest is history. LEVERAGE
- before Worldsex was so big, they grew by IMG SRCing everybody (there weren't trading scripts and most sites weren't aware of that trick). Mads was discovered and simply said "sorry, do you wanna trade with me? Now my site gets 500,000 real visitors". Later he sold the site (another history) but he was stopped. LEVERAGE.
- when the CJ sites shown up, things got so retarded the whole industry had to put a stop to it because visitors were afraid to click on any ad. I remember there was a CJ2 movement made to the image of TGP2 to correct those errors. LEVERAGE.
- when everybody got greedy and started with the Dialer fever, autoinstalls, trojan bars, trojan counters and any single shady thing in the book, a big amount of people stopped those sites by avoiding trading and blacklisting their asses. LEVERAGE.
So yes, we tried to do something, we tried to leverage things and correct what we knew would be happen later (as in.. TUBES!). We were betrayed, people laughed and attacked us more than what they helped (if any help), cheaters were the norm, most people was like "oooh, look at those idiots trying to correct this business". No surprise most of them are out of business as well, surprise. But again, yes, we tried, and we missed. Obviously, people that never tries will never miss. The difference is that if we had won the battle, the whole story would be different today and everybody would have benefited. The idiots that laughed and got a couple sales back then are... where? looking for job? I don't see most of them anymore and the last news I had they were crying about those "mean guys in the industry who are giving everything for free"
Anyway, sorry about the rant. At least we have proven we were right. Little consolation, but maybe people will learn that an united industry under certain rules and regulations could only be beneficial for 99% of people. May our defeat serve as a lesson
