the future of tgps and link lists (maybe)
 

This morning when I woke up I had a sort of idea

(not that I am seriously considering it)

what if ALL the tgps and linklists charged the surfers a small price for access

like 5.00 a month

people like pk worldsex and the hun could be multi millionares overnight

maybe the submited gallerys they would be posting might be from other tgp owners premoting their tgp ??

maybe in 4 to 5 years this might be the way things go

if ya think about how the adult internet would change because of this, It would be very far reaching

before anyone panics, this is just a what if fantasy thread

I could see something like that happening if the link list and tgp owners had to check age, like paysites do. I'd think it could be a good thing for everyone and a lot less free porn. Just a newbies 1.5 cents. |bow|

Anything that reduces the amount of totally free porn is a great idea, imho.

well I dont think if it happened it would have anything to do with decreasing the amaount of free porn, I think it would be about money

right now the real money is made by the program owners and not by the people controling most of the traffic (customers) that senerio doesnt fly in any other buisness model

It would only work if all the places did it together and I don't see everyone ever agreeing to this or anything else, but it would be nice.

Good point Tommy.

But if they are paying us for the porn, it's no longer free. :)

I don't have any doubt your bookmarkers would pay the monthly fee, but what about new traffic, with all the other available porn out there? How would the industry come together and sort of conform to this new idea? Of course the larger players such as yourself would have to venture out there first. :)

3- 4 years ago everyone said the same thing about paid submits

Yeah, I had also wondered why TGPs don't charge the surfers a small "surfing fee". The thing is though, everyone would have to agree to this model, and there is no shortage of TGPs that would stay open for free. But yeah, it would be interesting to do a test and see how it works.

And it is ironic that webmasters now pay for the privilege of giving away porn for free.
Make the surfers pay for access too, dammit. :D

Sorry, Tommy, I didn't post real clear, but in my mind, if they are paying to surf, it's not totally free anymore. Didn't word that right, I don't think.

Interesting concept that has been thought of before.

Another cool option is the guy that has a TGP for his members. It's inside the members area or has a link to it from the members area.

Just thinking out loud. :)

There've been lists before that try to get an email address out of a surfer after a few "free" visits. Once entered, the cookie was updated so it didnt block access anymore.
Not the same, but similar concept.
Also I've seen 1 paysite who sells submit spots where the galleries are listed inside a paysite members area. Again, not directly related, but I think goes to show the content value currently available for free.

Seems like a valid concept idea.. although I'm not sure where the line would be between "free" and "pay" site as far as regulations etc.

Selena, that's the way I was thinking as well. :) No longer free to surfers if they're paying webmasters for access to their directories.

It will be interesting to see what happens if this does get tested.

For every place to goes "paid to view", there will be 10 "free to view" that will take its place. I think the old die hard followers might pay, but getting new surfers will be a hard task.

Only one thing came to my mind after reading this thread and that listed content is not your content. After all it's just a tool for you to generate income. Maybe if you share your revenue... oooh even better - you will pay PPC or PPI to sponsors because you'll use their free content to promote their sites LOL. Which actually will turn things around wouldn't it - and here's how the idea of a paysite was born :) You can't have a free content listing and require som fee to be paid for it in order to view it, because in some time people will just start grabbing promo content from the sponsors and not even link to them - what will happen is people building *free* sites and galleries just for the $5 monthly... and in some moment the sponsor content will stop and here we come to what you were talking about - end of the free porn promoting - nobody will give it away free and everybody (including you guys) will in the same position as if time went back 5 years. In that case I'm for the $5 monthly fee, because I'm new to the biz and I would like to have an equal start with you all :)

Now, I don't want to be rude (but this post was so funny), but please stop dreaming Tommy. The story knows 100k of people that have denyed the future, so you may be also predicting it, but my logic just stops me from believing it.

well the gallerys and sites listed at the tgp are still free

maybe think of it as a fee for assembling the list everyday and doing the updates

other industrys are plagued by lawsuits some good and some bad
but liablity lawsuits govern the way they do buisness

and I am sure its only a matter of time before it happens here

what if some kid gets caught jerking off to whatever tgp
and the parents feel the kid has become addicted to porn and the tgp has correpted the kids morals etc etc and the parents sue for millions of dollars

if one person won, overnight there would be thousands of lawsuits

what then ????????????

We tried that - it was called AVS :D

Seriously - there are already sites doing this with charging pennies for gallery links & whatnot.

If EVERYONE did it, then it'd work. Not you'll never get everyone in the entire world to do it.

I don't see it happening, it will be like TGP2, some will like it some won't. I think it would be nearly impossible to get everyone to do it.

I have seen some sites charging for access to their "huge archives" though.

Avs Is a lot different and millions of people bought avs memberships
and it would still be a good thing if visa didnt have regulations against it

avs sort of pretended to be a safe guard against kids viewing porn but it was really a paysite with lots of different subsites

first of all they charged like 30 to 40 bucks or a trial with a 40 dollar recur
the list was free to see
and you had to put your password in at every site
most avs's dont add as many new sites as a tgp adds gallerys daily
avs's listed sites not gallerys
and most of those sites were a lot worse then the sites listed and free link sites


and when you think about it why would anyone buy an avs membership when they could just surf over to link o rama and find it for free.
But surfers bought millions of those passes and paid big money for em

I agree with swedguy...there will always be people who will offer porn for free...in fact if some LLs and TGPs started charging a nominal fee, they would see it as an opportunity to increase their traffic!

I am just saying anything is possable

Now lets take it a step further.
The trades you have with other tgps and linksites
could have revshare codes in the link urls

Do you know what would I do if I had an LL like Link-o-rama for instance. I'd build my own VIP area where I'd push HQ sites for $1 monthly, just to distinct payable surfers from the other punks out there and build some better marketing knowing that you're not serving SEs, nor other LLs - you'll be building a site only for your VIP members - not so many restrictions that you should care about. The advantages of such VIP area are actually pretty much, you should think about it ;) I think this could be done with you current LL software by only adding a new category and restricting access with .htaccess and offer signup on an unsuccessfull login.

Since this is my *reply* I would appreciate if somebody let me know if he/she decides to do it any time soon :)

I think the big site's traffic would drop off and grow smaller and smaller by the day....while sites that remained free would flourish with new traffic.

Yeah we`ll probably always compete with free porn eminating from one country or another. I could see something like that if our government said everything has to be behind age verification. But then that does bring up the matter of where new traffic comes from especially if we were still forced to compete with others who could still show whatever. As far as the US is concerned I think anything of that magnitude would be politically driven at this point.

What I think will happen is that webmasters will try to increase the quality of their sites in order to get listed in the VIP area. I personally prefer to have surfers that have verified their age with CC and have 100 quality hits instead of 3k smoochers. Maybe this is not so good for LL traffic, but for TGP, mentioning the large numbers...

hmmm, the more I think about it the better it looks :)

If they pay a nominal fee to get access = proved themself that they have a CC and want to use it. Same as AVS.
Since the traffic is already pre-approved, it's of higher quality.
Submitters will realise that you have higher quality traffic = higher quality submits. <--- good reason why people would sign up and retain. Of course there's more things you can provide that make them sign up and retain, but that's one thing.

I think A thumb tgp with a strong search engine presence would be perfect

I'd love to see you big traffic handlers go to a paid model. I'd finally get some traffic to my TGP. :D I'd probably have to switch from a 10mbps pipe to a 100.

I say go for it! |thumb

I would never take that big of a gamble with Tommys

I am working on anew tgp now and I am thinking about opening it free and then maybe 8 months later trying it

I like the idea but I also know that the biggest tgp owner out there wil never ever charge his visitors. And the rule is that the one who is the most succesfull, always has the true on his side.

just my cents

I think TGFind.com had a 'surfing charge' a few years back. After viewed X number of the galleries listed, you would get a popup requiring you to register. I am thinking that it was 4.95 a month.

I just visited TGFind.com. They still have a to register but it redirected back to the index.

ya know years ago I use to redirect some of my se traffic to a page asking the surfers to buy an AVS membership I dont remeber exactly but I think it did a good 40 sales a day

http://www.tommys-bookmarks.com/index1.html

And that is the truth. The almighty Hun, who has made himself rich by providing the cleanest and most honest page, would have to add more servers to handle the influx from those unwilling to pay to see our indentical advertising. To quote Ross Perot (referring to NAFTA), 'there would be a huge sucking sound' made by the movement of surfers to other reliably free venues.

i never thought it would be a problem to pay some $ to submit to linksites or tgp, i know tommy you started a post about charging 3 years ago or so on the ans board i didnt found it a bad idea that time and i still think its a good idea, and my thoughts are if all are doing it, alot of "one day" webmasters will be away from the bizz, the webmasters are not forched to pay for submitting, they still can choose to submit to other linksites who dont ask money....so it isnt forching the submitters, i know people would complain if realy all linksites would do it, because lately its a trend that newbies start bizz with a linksite instead of free sites or other things, but then the choise is still to the submitter, they dont have to pay if they dont want to, i think not on the getting rich part, i think at that part that a seriouse submitter will pay to have they sites listen, i think many cheaters will disapear, just my point of view.....(oke back checking if the trojan is gone from my puter, i hate puters:)!)

75% of linklists/tgps would disappear because surfers would suss out the winners and losers.

In time some of the remaining 25% would drop the charge and gain market share by reverting to the "free" model.

This in turn would encourage others to follow the "free" model and things would eventually end up where they are now.

My opinion, if thehun started charging $1 or 5 access fee per month, thehun would have almost zero traffic within a month as surfers would just go to another free place.

it would only work if all tgp owners did it at the exact same time...and if you can get agreement to that then I will personally start a free site that same day so I can get all that traffic!!!!!

cheers,
Luke

I actually think that as it stands now, with the quality of general submissions, paid spots partly taken up directly by sponsors (not gallery posters anymore), there is a tiny chance that it might work out with some specific rules:
· no sponsor content, none at all!
· no trade script, no other missleading links
= and above average experience for the surfer!

I turn this would probably attract some decent submissions, too, since the surfer has shown he/she is willing to pay.

But I agree with GG: we have tried it with AVS (which was good as long as it lasted), and after that I had actually tried briefly a micro-pay-system on my site for people to get to complete sets, but that failed badly...

Still - I would give it another go, particularly considering all the new micro billing options evolving, like SMS billing. Once they become more practical and worldwide accepted there could be a real chance, even if 1,000s of sites will continue giving away free porn.

Tommy, in a perfect world, it would work. If all the people listing free porn starting charging for it, well, we would make more money (if for no other reason, that we would stop paying for so much bandwidth!).

However, nature abhors a vacuum. If the top 10 links site and the top 10 TGPs start charging, the surfers just all go somewhere else. New free links and free TGPs would pop up, and your surfer base would pretty much disappear overnight.

The traffic you did send out would probably be better, as you would have filtered off all the freeloaders.

Of course, you could just turn tommy's into a low price membership site and get it over with. Nothing stopping you from charging for access to listings, I guess. I am not entirely sure how many people would be willing to give you free galleries so that you can make money, but that is another issue.

It's like TGP2 - a nice idea, but not as successful because the original TGPs and TGP galleries didn't go away. Instead, there are movie gallery posts, and they are WAY hotter than TGP2.

Alex

I think this might make it possible... and incorporate a central public counter service too... that sells adpsots on behalf of each site like adbrite.com

Been working on a system like this for my personal network of sites.

Right before the visa regulations impacted avs's, we had a softcore, fetish tgp site that we began charging for access to the non blind site that included hardcore galleries.

We made a ton of cash in three months before the visa/avs shit hit the fan. The avs we were using for access kicked us off. We tried to get another avs interested, but it was not easy.

Once one had a billing model, the possibilities of marketing this concept are endless Tommy.

We are right there with you. The problem, im my mind, is the billing model. We have proven that the concept works already.