Let me give you the Amateur Webmaster perspective on this. First off, I agree with you, links pages are out dated. They do send some hits, but not a lot and I agree the model needs updated. That is one reason I had Dawn Marie also put your link in her blog.

Here is our perspective. Over the years every Amatuer adult site where the girls promote themselves and provided free content to the site operator wants a link back. I understand that, however, most of these sites provide very little traffic back. So the way the Amateur market works instead of a girl promoting her site on a few places with lots of traffic they end up promoting themselves on a ton of sites that only send a few hits each. So not only are they giving the site operator free content they are also provide some traffic, be it a little a time. So many of the girls have felt “ripped off” over the years so to speak because of this. i.e. places like Watchers Web require free pictures and then even stamp them with their own URL not allowing the girl to have her URL on the picture. The girl gets very little in return except some emails from guys that will never buy anyway because all they care about is the free Watchers Web photos. Hence, the girls bury the watchers web link. This is how the “buried” links page came about.

Now with that said I can agree with you a that new model is needed. Probably some sort of two tiered system in which a girl can provide high profile return links and low profile return links. That is something we need to sort out in our industry. Many are moving to a “blog” model for their sites and I think this will eventually provide that level of granularity.

Just my 2¢