Let us not forget Xpics...
IMO they, along with Crescent, are probably two of the companies whose actions are most responsible for the billing climate we're in today.
During the Xpics hay day newbies were flooding the net, and it was like shooting fish in a barrel to get them to cough up a credit card number for "free" access to porn. Xpics had slick ads, slick tours and once they had that credit card number they'd slam that bad boy every month until you cancelled the card itself in most cases.
I doubt they were the first to shave, but they definitely popularized it! What did they top out at? 20 cents per click? I dont know what their real formula was, but I do know that at the time there was no other banner or ad that you could put in their place that could make more money consistently. This despite the shave. The checks were large and they showed up every week.
And there-in pretty much the entire industry's human nature is exposed. Virtually everyone sent traffic to Xpics in those days, most continued to do so even after it was obvious what was going on. Human nature makes it tough to cut your own income by say 50% to pull their ads and replace them with someone more honest.
It was easy to rationalize. It wasn't like spam or beastiality or anything like that because the webmaster drew no heat. All they had to do was keep cashing those checks that showed up every week like clockwork. Easy to tell yourself, hey, i'm just selling them traffic, none of my business what they do with it!
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