ADL Colin

I wrote this in 1999. Read paragraph 3 in particular.

"This business changes fast. In 3 short years I have seen many many site models come and go. Link sites, link exchanges, Top 50's, circle jerks, pic posts, thumbposts, straight sites, niche sites, search engine spams, and on and on. While some things remain relatively constant .. such as the popularity
of link sites .. other things change .. such as click through percentage and signup rates. When I first started for example, click through rates were much higher for a site's top banner and sign up ratios were MUCH better.

When the top 50/ circle jerk craze many of the "old timers" (pre-1996 webmasters) refused to participate for a variety of reasons one of which was that they believed the CJ industry was short lived. Well, a lot of us "circle jerkers" agreed with that in both private conversations and in public but our point was this: We could take advantage of the then very easy CJ money and use the capital for further investments and expansion capital.

The humorous part to me was that the industry could be ROUGHLY divided by the length of time they had been in the industry. The players that had been around a little while and the very new players of which it was the very new players that seemed to do all the circle jerk innovating.

Now I understand that some didn't participate because of religious reasons .. errr .. moral reasons .. don't jerk off the customer! But I also feel some of it was a dinosaurian approach. The common argument of the day was "Circle jerk traffic is worthless." I can tell you for a fact that it wasn't worthless .. at first it was difficult to achieve the same signup ratios as non-CJ sites but in time, we were able to get the same ratios. Millions of dollars were made and "empires"
started. Some of the major players are HUGE but somewhat silent players now .. preferring to work on their latest marvels in semi-obscurity rather than risk being copied from.