It was a bloody marvelous idea and handled properly by business men who understood porn, the market and the Internet it could of been a pot of gold.
but some get rich quick fools decided the best way to sell porn was to give it away, make affiliates important far beyond their need and to spend a lot of money selling a product that basically sells itself.
Maybe done right we would still be getting 2% ratios. Traffic would be lower because all the free loaders wouldn't be here. But all those who could and would buy. Would HAVE to buy. Today they don't and what's plainly clear is they don't.
In the beginning there was nothing like the free content there is today, so I assume you're talking BS through not being around then.
In the beginning hosting and BW was a lot of money and slow. Sites simply couldn't afford to give out tons of free content. The cost factor dictated the amount. Also if you were around in 1995-2000 you will remember the size of movies and the compression level.
You don't need to spend 50% of your turnover selling porn, porn is a product that sells itself. Men love it, men seek it and prior to the affiliate programs loading images onto Newsgroups brought great traffic.
Paying affiliates 5% would of been fine. 95 wold never of got past the first few months. Those that did would of put up more than enough free porn to bring the interested. If you were around in the early days you would know about the problems of getting a gallery listed on a good TGP site.
The reason so many affiliates need traffic is because, there's too many of them. Too much traffic is needed to get a sale, because too many affiliates are putting up too much free porn.
The notion that surfers would only come because of the ease, convenience and availability of online porn is ridiculous. Prior to the Internet men would drive many miles to get a porn mag or video. To then give them free porn is the quantity online porn does s ludicrous. It satisfies the need of 999-1,000 or even 1999-2,000. That's the number of lost prospective customers.
Someone looking regularly at a product is a prospective client. Discount those in countries we can't bill, those under 18 and the loss is vast.
Online people only see the 1 in 1,000 who did buy.
