History Lesson please
 

I'm curious, how did the whole concept of LL's and freesites evolve? Seems like there's quite a rigid formula for freesites nowdays, and I'm curious as to who started it, how and why. I started adult web publishing not very long ago (oh my, it's been actually 9 months come to think of it!), before that I didn't even surf porn... so I would appreciate a short history lesson if anyone cares to waste a few minutes on this useless noob question lol :D

try this site http://www.buildinganempire.com/, it's old and has descriptions of the times when it all started. not just link lists concept, but everything.

I don't think there is a real hard set date or even a time frame. LL's (like everything else) just evolved over time.

Yeah, I wasn't thinking in terms of a timeline, more like, did people use to submit larger sites, or smaller sites? did TGP with galleries came first and then someone came up with the clever idea of listing only sites? just curious really, as this seems like a very set format and very structured.

The rules that a lot of us have in place came about over a long period of time & are pretty much based on trends that we each saw that we didn't like. Like counters for example - there was a time when no one had a problem with them, but then some of them started with hidden files & spyware & whatnot, so a lot of us banned them.

I will say that I can't think of any rules that I've put in place for the last few years.

As far as what came 1st, I'd say (by definitions that we use today) galleries came 1st - just a page of pics (not thumbs, just the pics loading one after another) or a page of text links to the pics. Thumbs only became the norm a couple years later. When I started, I was just linking to pages that I found & thought looked cool. There was no distinction between TGP's & Link Lists, you pretty much just had a site that linked to porn :)

Pretty neat thread. Nice to hear how things started and notice the evolution to how things are now.

I made good money in the early years just from banner farms no links to pics even.

Fascinating thread. Anyone else got any recollections of the good old days? |thumb

I will say that it's a lot easier for me to speak out loud about the old days than it is to type it up.

When the first rules about the numbers of pics required came out, it used to be that you could put five thumbs on a page and have 4 pages of galleries - and you could plaster a ton of agressive links pretty much however you wished.

It was pretty common to make $200-300 fairly soon from even nasty looking freesites.

There was also a pattern and a period of what I called 'long page' sites - each page was 3 to 6 screens long and plastered with links. you made the surfer really look around to find the pics.

Then a bunch of folks came back from las vegas one year, and bang, the venerable ten thumb minimum rule, and a bunch of other new rules, went up everywhere and became the norm.

If your radio show was on while I was awake, I'd be happy to listen lol if you're ever in the mood in the middle of your night, I'm here to listen on skype ;) love finding new victims to practice my English on. Offer is open to everyone btw, just hit me up on ICQ if you have Skype and a headset.

The same type of start seemed to happen at the Hun - linking to what was "neat" and surfers submitting pages they found
A bunch of the old type sites can still be found in DMOZ listings - its pretty cool to look back

I registered my domain in late 97, so the Jan 28 1998 is a really good ideaof what I was doing back then:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://...nk-o-rama.com/

There were linklists with a lot of today's rules back before I started. The good old days when you would build one site, get it listed on persiankitty and it would just stay on the list and get rotated.

I still remember the day when I went from about 100 visitors/day to 50k. I think that day was in March of 96. Like a moron, I waited until July to get a real domain name. Next month my first domain turns 10 :)

There were many easy ways to make serious money and still are. Blind linking thumbs comes to mind |escape|