why did you join this biz?

[GeorgeTH]

Originally posted by shima
Back in 97 I was curious why there are so many XPics banners all over the place, so I started sniffing around and found the reason. They paid 18 cents per click. It was a good start.

...those were the days... I think even Private Gold used to pay 0.12 per click back then...

I came to this by pure curiosity: I was online from late 1995 onwards; that a friend was involved in the start-up of the first local ISP certainly helped.
In 1996/7 I had a site up (more for fun and learning) linking to resources (like HTML tutorials and free web graphics) and offering free fonts. I earned a few decent rewards with it but never got past 360 hits a day.
So one day in mid 1997 I made a series gallery from collected pictures on Geocities and submitted it to TheHun: it got over 7,600 hits in just over 4 or 5 hours until Geocities took it down (of course - I had actually expected this). This showed me where the traffic was!
I never managed to get any employment after I moved from Europe to Australia, and my savings were dwindling away, so in a way I was keen for some extra income, too!
So when the first free adult servers came up in late 1997/early 1998 I was one of the first to take advantage of their offer: 2 mb of storage(!!) for a free adult site. Then in March 1998 fsn.net was offering free sub-domains with 5 (or was it 10) mb, it was a stinker of a day, so on the spirit of the moment TropicHeat.fsn.net was born...

Stupid me (not really - it was fun!) went travelling in late 1999 when the boom really started and somehow I never managed to get the same foodhold ever since. Only the last 5-6 months have I've been doing this almost fulltime, but the income is nothing compared to what it used to be back in 1999.