The other impressive thing about Party was that it was basically owned by just a few people when it floated, so they got seriously rich from the IPO...
Speaking as someone who has been involved in web development for about 6 years, it's long been bandied about that the main sectors that make money off the internet are
gambling and Pornography... nowadays the likes of eBay and Google show other business areas that are profitable, but still the revenues from the major net gambling players are still very impressive, and affiliates can potentially build up serious revenue streams by getting a cut of the action.
One thing that can be interesting if you play online a lot is to look up the rake stats in PokerTracker, to get an idea how much they take in rake on the
hands that you've played in... and compare that to how much profit you made during that time...