This only started with Google. They’re the only reason it’s even possible. You get a high pagerank if people link to you. So people offer you a free counter you can put on your website. The counter links back to them, they get a link, you get a free counter, everyone’s happy. Especially since the site providing the free counter is getting a huge pagerank increase. Some of these types of sites have a pr8-10! It’s really amazing.
Well, here’s one who is really cool, they’ve used their pagerank really well. They have like 10 pages on their site, each of which is about some web topic, and all it is is an affiliate page to amazon, or a web design company, or yahoo or something like that. They even have one to ebay, on which they just tell people to sign up at ebay. THEY COME UP #3 on google for the search term ‘ebay’!!!!!!!! That search term is searched like 67,000,000 times each month! They’re making a fortune!
What a great business model.