Now I'm sure you understand already that the main reason all these porn sites are on the net is because they are making money for their owners [or at least they're intended to]. You've probably surfed enough by now to notice that the non-pay sites are flinging a lot of ads in your direction. For a good webmaster there's a subtle balance between the following factors: the cost of the site for bandwidth and storage, the cost of producing content and maintaining the site, the revenue generated by the site and the level of satisfaction of the site's visitors.

I'm sure you've noticed that some webmasters do an absolutely lousey job of achieving that balance. We visit their sites under protest, sometimes even resorting to turning JavaScript off so we don't have to endure their popups and other time-wasting behaviours. If the content is good enough we may try to steal it so we don't have to return, ugh!

But down at the bottom, the hard fact is that you, the site surfer, are expected to pay. You're the one supporting all these sites. You support it by buying the monthly memberships, the video feeds and the hot-chat access. You support it when you use the credit cards you get online. This revenue goes to many differenet pockets to pay for the hundreds of schemes that are in place to bring you to the page where you're going to sign up and hand them your money.

First you have to be carefully guided through pages that are going to bring you to the state where you're ready to shell out your money and then finally you're delivered to the page where the opportunity is offered. And if the jobs has been done properly, you sign up and the cash registers start to ring for all the participants and your happy because you got what you've been looking for.

Most porn sites have banner ads on them for several purposes. Typically there are three of these and you can see examples on this site. On a free site you will nearly always see banners imposed by the hosting server. These show up with monotonous regularity at the top and bottom of each page. The site's webmaster is responsible for placing the other ads. Many of the banners are reciprocal links. These are links traded between webmasters to increase traffic, i.e., I'll send people to your site if you send them to mine.

The other ads are the ones that generate revenue for the site's owner. They are sometimes called click-throughs. You can usually tell them by looking at your browser's status line that shows you where the link is going. If you see the words 'cgi' or 'script' or some long numbers like '?5822976' then it's very likely that the server at the far end is going to run a script that collects the site owner's reference number and clicks up his counter and thus adds a few cents to his total. Some times you cannot tell because the page has written something special to the status line which ovewrites the link info.

I've provided a specific example below. It's from amateurpages.com. They're pretty good at this. They're got good banners, a good setup to help webmasters set up the click-thru links and some reasonable free content so that visitors feel that their trip wasn't wasted even if they didn't go with the pitch. And it goes without saying, that they're masters of tantalization... If you go look for your self using the array of images and links I've added below, then you'll see what I mean and without prejudice I must admit I'll make a few cents.