I started in 1997, my company sent me to a conference and I learned how to do HTML in about an hour. I came home and started a golf site on geocities that got about 20 hits a month. After surfing around and seeing how many hit's adult sites were getting I decided to try that. My first adult site was hosted on porncity and it was all "borrowed" content. I had 2 sponsers whose names escape me now since they no longer exist but one was per click and the other was a progressive signup program. I couldn't believe it the day a check for $2000+ showed up, I hauled ass to the bank to deposit it just to make sure it would clear. (Those were the days) My site ended up in the top ten at xxxcounter for a long time until I got some emails from content providers that were more than a little upset with me borrowing their content. That's when I finally learned content wasn't "public domain".
Since then I've done about anything you can think of, tgp, tgp2, link lists, se's, email, etc. Moving into paysites now, hopefully it will work out, I don't want to go back to a day job ever again.