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It goes back even farther than that.
This whole mentality of getting free stuff germinated during the BBS days. The vast majority of people I knew on various BBSes were online lookin' for free porn - the most active local BBSes were always the adult ones.
And the availability of free porn grew exponentially with the Usenet newsgroups and later the web.
I wouldn't blame just the surfers-turned-webmasters - the blame is shared by content producers who developed the mentality that giving away more free content as advertising would translate to more traffic and sign-ups. It reached a critical mass and exploded in everyone's faces.
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