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I could give you a whole book on the real history of adult online, starting from the very very beginning.
I won't do the entire thing here, but let me give a tiny clip:
In the beginning (1994-1995), there were a few adult web sites that hosted personal and/or favorite nudes and porn pics. Those sites would typically appear, be fun for a few days to a few weeks until people other than the creator of the site learned about them, they'd get a few hundred visitors, and then they'd get taken down.
They got taken down because these little personal sites would be hit with bandwidth bills for up to a couple hundred dollars (bandwidth was exxxxpensive and a few hundred visitors was a BIG site). Since there was no way to make money, they'd simply disappear. It was very hard to find good web sites in those early days, but there were a handful that would appear now and then.
So I got a 900# phone sex line and started the XPics Site of the Day, where I featured a quality web site each day. At the time, there were three players in the industry. Me (XPics), Persian Kitty (#2), and Serge - who kept putting up amazing free web site content!
At that time, there were no banners and no one to advertise. My phone sex line blew up, and I developed the first banner program and the first membership web site (Sex Roulette). Suddenly, free web sites could advertise, and they could pay the bills! As soon as my affiliate program went live, the number of free web sites exploded and the next 18 months were the heyday of early adult.
Then we get to Charter Pacific, Visa, and that's all a story for another day I suppose. But this above is how the real modern adult era of the web came to be...
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