Hey JD,
Yup, the AVS's did fuck themselves out of a lot of long term business for percieved short term gain, some of them still are. If Netverifier was to pay me for all of the rebills they still collect on sites that were once good enough to qualify as Elite I'd be a rich man. But they changed the rules, downgraded the sites, and took my rebills, justifying it by having higher standards now. Pissed me off enough that I moved them. I'm still screwed for all of the rebills, but they're screwed as well because if I'm not making money with them, they're not making money with me. Ditto for Adult Check, who screwed thousands of wm's out of millions of dollars in rebills. Luckily for me I didn't have much with AC so I got out fairly painlessly.
I'm not saying AVS is the only way to go, never put all of your eggs in one basket, but if I was sitting on 400 premium AVS sites that weren't doing anything I'd split them up between ProAdult Quantum and CyberAge Platinum. The 4000 feeder sites I'd likely have half as AVS feeders, half as free sites
And I wouldn't worry about the age of the content so much, if you were buying content in the late 90's it's so old it may as well be new and I can't see any AVS turning you down for it. I've got about $100K in content I bought back then and no AVS has rejected it becouse it's old. It will take me years to go through all of it.
The thing is, so many people who were very good at the AVS game got out of it when a couple of companies screwed them, and now the conventional wisdom is that it's dead, so newbies go right into free sites because they think that's the way it is.
I'm pretty sure that's one of the reasons my AVS income is slowly and steadily rising, and why I still don't need a day job
There's not as much competition there anymore.
Celebs I still stay away from, used to do ok with them but dropped them when the legal shit started and haven't missed them. Maybe it's different now, but I don't even know who's famous anymore
If you want to shoot the shit a bit my email is on the page my sig leads to. I think I remember you from the NV board where I used a different nick.