After my first year of college, I needed a job. So I did what people did back then: I opened the newspaper and started scanning the classifieds. One listing stood out: “Image Librarian.” I had no idea what that meant, but I applied, and got the job.
It turned out to be exactly as analog as it sounds. At the time, adult content was still shot on film, processed into slides and stored physically. My job was to scan those slides into a computer so they could be used online. That was the bridge between two worlds: physical media being dragged, pixel by pixel, into the early adult internet.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being in this space for decades, it’s that the next shift is always coming and you probably won’t see it clearly until you’re already in it.
The company was called ITN and its core business wasn’t even web-based. It ran “audiotext” lines, which was the SFW term for phone sex. The internet was originally just seen as a promotional tool for those lines, but right around the time I joined, someone had the idea that maybe the images themselves could be the product.
That idea became iGallery. Like a lot of early internet ventures, it was built by a small team figuring things out as we went. There were no playbooks, frameworks or “best practices.” Just trial, error and a lot of late nights.
When HTML Was a High-Paid Skill
Because I already knew Unix and had been building basic websites, I quickly moved from scanning images to writing HTML. It’s strange to say now, but at the time, writing HTML was a specialized, well-paid job. The barrier to entry wasn’t just knowledge; it was access to knowledge.
Everything moved fast. Not in the polished, iterative way we think of today, but in bursts of chaotic innovation. If something worked, it got copied immediately. If it didn’t, it disappeared just as fast.
And everything had constraints. Most users were on painfully slow connections. Images had to be small, but still compelling enough to convert into a sale. You were limited to web-safe colors. Load times weren’t just a UX concern; they were existential. If a user had to click three times before reaching a payment page, you probably lost them.
Inventing Online Payments on the Fly
There was also one small problem: Online credit card processing didn’t really exist in any standardized way.
Most companies were using physical merchant terminals, so we had to figure out how to take the computer the bank gave us, connect it to our systems and process transactions programmatically. It was a hack in the purest sense of the word, born out of pure necessity.
Yet despite all of this friction, the business model worked almost absurdly well. If you had a domain with a suggestive name, put up some images and charged $20 to $30 a month, you could make a lot of money. The demand was there and the competition hadn’t caught up yet.
The Birth of Affiliate Marketing
One of the most important innovations to come out of that era was affiliate marketing. Today, affiliate systems are everywhere, but in the early days of the web, the adult industry was one of the primary places it took shape. We built systems that allowed other site owners to send traffic to us and earn a percentage of the revenue.
That introduced entirely new challenges: tracking users across sites, attributing sales correctly and dealing with fraud. People figured out very quickly how to game the system, so we had to evolve just as quickly to stay ahead.
This also led to some… creative solutions.
I built something we called the “exit chain.” When a user tried to close their browser, another site would immediately open. And another. And another. It was aggressive, effective and universally hated. But it kept users inside a monetized loop, and we had to make sure affiliate IDs were passed along the entire chain so everyone got paid. If you ever wondered why people still have a visceral reaction to popups, this is part of the reason.
Streaming Video Before Streaming Existed
Then came video. We found hardware that could convert video into a sequence of images. Using Netscape’s “jpeg push” technique, we could continuously update a single image tag to simulate motion. It wasn’t video in the modern sense, but it was close enough to feel like magic at the time.
Then one day, watching wasn’t enough. Users wanted interaction, so I built a real-time chat system that allowed performers and viewers to communicate live. That meant solving problems in synchronization, performance and, again, attribution. If an affiliate sent a user into a live session, they needed to get credit for anything that user spent.
None of this was off-the-shelf. There were no libraries to install, no Stack Overflow answers to copy. JavaScript wasn’t designed to do the things we were forcing it to do, and because it ran on the user’s machine, which was often underpowered, we had to be extremely careful about performance.
Without realizing it, we were inventing patterns that would later become standard.
The Rise of Megasites and TGPs
As these systems matured, they gave rise to megasites and traffic ecosystems like thumbnail gallery posts (TGPs).
I never built one myself at the time, though in hindsight I probably should have. The model was simple: Create a page of thumbnails, distribute it across the web and link everything back to a monetized site. Users clicked, traffic flowed and revenue followed. It sounds primitive now, but it worked incredibly well. Entire businesses were built on that loop.
The Shift to Personal Content
Around 2008, the landscape started to change. I worked on rebuilding the CMS for Hustler, but after that, something shifted. The large companies and affiliate-driven megasites weren’t hiring the way they used to. The old model, massive libraries of content behind a subscription paywall, started losing its dominance.
I ended up at Clips4Sale, a company whose model I initially didn’t believe in. They sold individual videos instead of subscriptions. No big affiliate machine. No all-you-can-eat membership. It felt like it shouldn’t work.
I stayed there for 15 years.
What I missed, and what many of us missed, was that the audience had changed. People no longer just wanted volume. They wanted connection. They wanted a sense of relationship with the creator.
The industry moved from scale to personalization and with that came new requirements. You couldn’t just have content; you needed quality content, consistently updated. The barrier to entry got higher, even as the tools became more accessible.
Advice for the Next Wave
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being in this space for decades, it’s that the next shift is always coming and you probably won’t see it clearly until you’re already in it. I didn’t see the transition to creator-driven platforms coming. The next transformation is already underway somewhere, quietly, the way all of them start. Hopefully, I’ll recognize it in time to help build it.
If you’re building a company in this space, or any space, invest in a good developer. But more importantly, listen to them. Don’t just hand them a list of requirements. The real value often comes from the moments when an engineer says, “Hey, take a look at this. It’s pretty cool.”
That’s how a lot of this industry was built in the first place.
Tanguy has worked in web development for more than 30 years and was a pioneering lead developer during the early evolution of the adult internet industry.
