I also remember not knowing how to use Google when I first started surfing but searching everything through the aol toolbar. And when surfing porn I would see pages and "alt tags" with keywords stuffed in them, so I sort of figured out they were trying to aim for that keyword to make money perhaps, and seeing real small spam text at the bottom of pages and wondering what that was for.
And when surfing porn, sometimes I would look at the url address and see
something like
www.porn.com/refid:blahblah, so I figured someone was getting credit for the signup. And then clicking "webmasters here" on a bunch of paysite and reading about $35 per sign up. That was the beginning for me!