>>10898485In the 90s, there were barely any places where you could actually host image files to show off your art and the few places that did were super low res shit.
Internet money and the infrastructure wasn't really there until January 2000, and two weeks later, the dot-com bubble popped.
If you want to know how shit it was, go look at Oafe's reviews. He keeps the 90s alive, despite actually being able to host millions of files and offer enough bandwidth to more than 10 people at once. Modern internet is so amazing and cheap they're able to stay up everyday instead of every other week.
Also, they really didn't have a payment method set up until the 00s either. So a lot of places still relied on checks and, if youwere brave enough, manilla envelopes with cash inside inside another envelope.
Whatever Paypal was before Paypal, almost nobody used it, but it was a godsend to artists when people started trusting electronic commerce from anywhere but places like eBay (mostly dealt with paper checks until late 1999), amazon, and other early internet mainstays.
Anyway, 00s is when fanart really started to kick off.