I have an easy way of knowing when I started. I left the Air Force the first week ok November '96 and had my first site up the same week. Hit the jackpot with Yahoo on day 2 and had my first $10k check within 2 weeks of leaving the Military. Damn I rode that Yahoo listing like a sloppy slut.
MissEve - Remember when you, KC, and I got the C&D for selling the Pam & Tommy videos sometime in early '98. I know I changed my drawers that day.
Vick, I remember meeting you in Vegas in jan '98 along with Claudia. Was dealing with Tad a lot back then.
Grimm - Xpics was so bad about overpaying. I had someone call me up one day wanting to prepay $20k for a couple weeks traffic. Of course I said OK. After the 2 weeks they told me the traffic hadn't performed as well as they had expected and they didn't want to renew the deal. A few hours later a different Xpics rep called me saying they had just found my site and wanted to pay $25k for 2 weeks. Gotta love sales reps
Anyone remember the hotteen.com project? A dozen or so webmasters joined together and used the site to mix and grow traffic. Was a very successful project. Back when the TTS toplist script was king. Before TTS I used a script that Tom at BlueGravity built. Was better than using MKstats like I did for the first few months. Running a toplist by hand sucked but made a ton of $ until I found a way to automate it. Getting a script to run my toplists was like living in the dark all your life and someone flipping a lite on one day. Damn, that was a long time ago.