Hey Xplicit,
I don't see any ICQs from you...
I wasn't with the company way back in 1996, but I do know that the domain cashring.com only started getting used later (I guess in 1999). Originally CashRing was built to offer many types of products, from hosting to dating...kind of like a commission junction. Only in the past few years has it focused on IwantU now.
In 1996/1997 IwantU did have some affiliates, basically from word of mouth. So, we did payout money in those years, just probably not much
If you go checkout the site in Alexa' Wayback machine, you're gonna laugh at some of the earliest versions ...they converted somehow though! It doesn't seem to have the very first version of ours or some other sites in their 'wayback machine' though.