Originally Posted by Due

I think part of that reason is that there have been a lot of sponsors who produced template pay sites as if they where a factory.
It became easier to produce a new pay site every 2 weeks with 100 hosted galleries / 50 promo videos than actually building and maintaining a couple of websites.
One of the reasons was that many affiliates switched to automated promotion tools, auto import galleries and videos. all build on templates etc. so it obviously would but convert.

it's not the free content that is the main thing hurting sales, it's when you start promoting sites being blindfolded.