Old school webmasters, what were the early days like?

hehe nice story

Some memories:

Used to be able submit pages to infoseek and they were indexed real-time.

Used to know an employee code to submit sites to yahoo. Had the number one searches for sex and fuck on Yahoo! for years. Over $100k/year income from one listing to a free site with 20 pics that was hardly ever updated.

Domains were more expensive so there was less competition in the search engines. Once had the top 40 searches in excite for "sex".

Started a top 50 site and was doing over 100k visitors/day within a week on board hype alone.

Ahhhh, the good old days, when snow was the king on GFY (in his own mind),
AMP was telling us stories about his previous life in the Gulf War, Hungryman hadnt started ripping of other webmasters yet..... Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand GFY was girl free..... Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah the good old times..

Back in da dayz.. bandwidth was a lot more expensive if you paid for it. Otherwise you had a bunch of free hosts who did not worry as much about the TOS as today where you post a nice pic, get some decent hits, and they close you down in an hour.

You had a bunch of those pay per click scams where they all promised to pay you .02-05ct a click, and never did.

If you had relevant content, you actually got a good page listing on the search engines, and it wasn't unheard of to be on the first page or two w/o much effort.

Tech support for a number of things was fairly nonexistant depending on what it was.

You had a bunch of complete crap sites littering the net. So if you looked for something, you'd find 100's of sites that looked like they were done by 12 year olds.

You could actually FIND something on a search engine w/o having to do advance searchs, useing "'s, and all the rest.

You made money hand over fist if you had a good site, good content, and traffic as you were in a small pond, versus the ocean of sharks like today.

You did not have conglomertes running everything, like today. Most were fairly small, independants.

Those are some I can think of off the top of my head, but I am sure there are plenty more. There have been a lot of changes since '96 when I started my first site, which nothing more than a whoo hoo I can do html. But now you have a deep ocean of 'companies' versus individuals.

Even better was when they went multi-node and you could see what the people on the other nodes were downloading. I learned WAY too much about my high school friends that way.

Oh Geeeeeeeeeeeeeeez ... I remember when I had to push porn both ways uphill ...
Everyone was a pioneer
Less competition
Less laws
More profit
Stunned members
Credit card companies did not care
Circle Jerks (ew) created some good alliances, as well some bad.

and ASCII porn ... what kind of twisted imagination you'd need to 'enjoy' that? (You, back in to your rubber room, NOW!)

edit: oh yah, and idiots (oops, good customers) always sent cash via letter-mail.

Damn, this thread was started IN the early days to some posters

good one ;-)

GFY...the early years..

All we had to do was to take a few pictures of my wife and make a shity tour and post to TGP sites and link list and we were pullng down some pretty big bucks in the old days.

When I began (in 1994) we had one registrar, Internic, and the cost was $100 for 2 years. I found an old invoice from 1996 when I had to renew again and it was $100 for another 2 years.

Bandwidth was $12.50 a gig.

Many sites were made from Usenet content.

My first sponsor disappeared owing me money (funny to say they are now one of the largest programs there is).

They were fun... but we thought the sky was falling back then, too.