Yes and no. I used to think that this was true, but it's not entirely true. For example I'm currently working a softcore fetish niche and it's converting at a rate of 1:400 with tgp traffic. It's converting so well that I'm tempted to try some non-nude galleries and see how they run.

I think it's more about saturation of a sponsor and a niche that effects the ratio more than messy and ugly. I've been trying to use smaller sponsors and I find the ratio is much better with them. Also working niches that aren't as popular among webmasters...so that can be messy & ugly or pretty and a fetish, just as long as its not popular among webmasters. Too many people after the same piece of pie just doesn't help ratios.

The whole classy Vs ugly tour debate is all perpendicular to the niche the paysite is in imo. While I don't have much experiance in pushing vanilla paysites, my own traffic seems to convert that on glitsy tours rather then pox ones.

As for bdsm micro niches & the granny sub-niches. My most horribly amateurish designs always by far, out-convert anything that looks like it was done by a designer.

But YMMV.

-N

After more then 4 years I know it always goes up and down but I have never seen this before.
The past 3 weeks are so bad I am about to get into panic.

I never have generated so much traffic as now and never had so little sales.
And on top of that the dollar is getting les worth everyday.

This is really scary shit.
Hope it goes by soon.

I have noticed that as well over the past year and a half to two year period, but it has been worse since the beginning of this year. At least on the limited basis of what I have been able to observe


spaz

mmmm
2004 1.234
2005 1.567
2006 1.1986 with already the amound of traffic which i send in a whole year in 2005.
Now i have 2 ideas about this,1: in 2004 i still made alot of free sites
in 2005 i stopped making free sites maybe i made 6 or so,
2006 i made one free site this year i do galleries, hubs ,seo pages, LLs and other projects, my second view...the sponsors but i will be wise and keep my point of view for myself here, and for real i dont believe in summer slowdowns or christmas holiday slowdowns:D

I pay for traffic dearly, but:

1:84 year to date
1:67 month to date

Last Friday was my record day for the year so far believe it or not. I know it was a pleasant shock to me too, lol.

So paysites can convert well once everything is dialed in, but the less you know about what they want versus what you're offering, the higher the ratios will go. (track those clicks, make those spreadsheets, know your numbers)

If I was doing free sites and/or tgp's full time, I'd still spend a hell of a lot of time on the SE's searching on niche terms for each and every site I built. Submitting to the sites ranking well. I want the guy who searched for "big boobed redheads" on my site featuring a big boobed redhead and promoting a big boob/redhead sponsor. And how am I going to do it? I'm going to search on SE's for "big boobs" "redheads" "big boob redheads" etc etc and scan the results for link lists. Not exact science, but if you cant get exact, go with "more likely"..

I know nobody asked for advice, and it's preaching to the choir a lot on this board because there is a lot of experience here, but maybe that's helpful to some.

i do have to say most part of my sales are comming from my old freesites...which are stil listed at gg, hoes , dd, rr, smutgremlin, link for sex and some are from almost 5 years ago, those sites are also to find in ses ...now i know tgp traffic is different traffic then linksite traffic, and i push alot of tgp traffic this year, maybe its time to go back of making free sites again ( and that i hate so much and its so fucking boring and for real i lost my touch with those, it takes me alot of hours to make one), well i dont need it, i make my money otherway now in this bizz, i work for 3 people and am very happy with what i do, i only cant bare that i worked almost 4 years 18 hours a day on my own stuff and that my sales are dropping there, if you have a sponsor which give you for 3 years a ratio of 1.88 and then you suddenly drop to 1.2250 and it stays that way then i start to think oke something is wrong. i dont want to nag alot because i want to stay in a good mood, its weekend and relax time heheheh:D|boobies|

As a paysite owner i find these threads very useful to see how we compare with the average. Its a tough game thesedays, we were around 9 years ago and have seen a big change in conversions ratios over the years, but by keeping up with the times and making sure the surfer is given as much as they need to get that credit card out we have been pretty constant

We just added NATS, which has helped a lot. Looking at the stats so far this month our average conversion for affiliates (most are TGP/Blog guys) is 1:483

Thats NATS though, the CCBill system we run also currently shows 1:1850 (raw clicks) which while is not bad is not anywhere near as nice as we see with NATS.

I hear you Stu |crazy|
And I am still building freesites.