Well, I've been in this decade for about a decade now so I have a littler perspective on this. Five or 6 years ago, in my opinion, it was harder to make money in the business than it was 10 years ago. Today, it's harder to make money than it was 5 or 6 years ago. This is due to a lot of things but it will never be as easy to make money again on the web as it was in 1996. In 1996, you could put up an Adult Check AVS site with minimal html skills and the next day you'd have made $50 in sales just from the Adult Check link list. It required no marketing skills whatsoever. You could buy a domain, throw up a site, and Yahoo would list it in their directory for free, as would all the other search engines. There wasn't anywhere near as much competition as their is now, so you'd get thousands of free visitors from the search engines from day one of opening your site.

It just took very, very little effort to make money in this business. What kept the business from getting saturated back then is that it took money to get into the business. Domains were $100 a pop from Network Solutions. Hosting was $3.00 per gig. Then there were the technical issues. There weren't all these programs that allowed people with no computer skills to build websites. You actually had to be a computer geek, learn html, and have a basic understanding of how the Internet worked.

Now, 5 or 6 years ago, it was a little harder to make money in the business but still easy. This was the golden age of tgp galleries, where any newbie could build a gallery, submit it to 100 tgps and make good money every week. Then as the years went on, cheaters caused TGPs to close submit forms and partner accounts and paid listings made it harder and harder for a newbie to make a buck. Add in the fact that there is now 1,000 times as many webmasters as there were even a few years ago (but not 1,000 times more paying porn customers) and it's a little harder to make a buck.

It's easier than ever for some one to get into this business. They need no technical knowledge and no money, but most of them will end up putting in a lot of time trying different things and making very little money for their efforts. I've seen newbies come and go for years, and it seems like each generation is giving up sooner and sooner but there's always twice as many newbies coming to take their place. In Internet terms, 1 year is a decade, and every year, we see major changes in this industry. It's not always easy to adapt, so no one's income is really secure. It doesn't really matter what part of the business you're in, it's all going to change and get harder as time goes on, mainly from increased competition in your field. It doesn't really matter if you're a paysite owner, tgp owner, photographer, free site owner, AVS guy, or whatever, the business is not going to get easier and it's not going to stay the same either.