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Making free sites sucks
Yes, I'm a cranky old 35 yo bastard who thinks its bloody hard work making silly little free sites each day, for what, a sale a week if I'm really lucky. I am impatient, and wanting results, not knowing if I'm doing the right thing, using the right sponsors and giving them enough time.
I used to do many sales a day, a long time ago, now I would be happy with a couple a day, that alone would make me delirious right now, how sad is that? You turn around and a months gone past and u have like 3 sales or something, wohoo, lol. Snow ball effect, yes I hear about it, I hope its real and the traffic will go up, I'm just wondering if I am doing the right thing by just concentrating on one site a day and submtting it to all the sites, maybe I should be trying to make 4 or 5 a day and submit to different LL for each one, maybe that would boost the traffic up. You really need lets say 5k clicks to a sponsor a day to do 4 or 5 sales (if your lucky right? based on FS traffic) a day, thats a shit load of traffic, I wonder if it will ever get to that level. Then I think, maybe I should try to generate the traffic using paid passes etc for galleries, but then its a risk u might not get your investment back. I probably should do more each day, do some gals and blogs as well, it all takes its toll mentailly I think, keeping on trying to keep doing stuff, at least until some sales start flowing. Sure I can get them listed, and I have the templates and link lists down ok, the process is streamlined as best it can be I suppose, its still depressing though. Then I got a sale today, one crappy little sale from a gallery I had listed a couple weeks ago and suddenly one sale makes me feel good. Havent done consistent sales for a long long time, probably because I dont do the same thing every day for 6 months to give it a go, but should I be making free sites every day? Is it worth it more than it is to create and submit galleries each day? I know a couple years ago it definitely was worth it for the free sites, as they did get some good search traffic a month or so after the submission. Yes I suppose its better than working at Mcdonalds. I have to give full credit to those of u that make your money from free site creation, and webmasters in general who rely on it for their livelihood, its very hard to work by yourself and try to do something that makes money, at least it is for me right now. I find it hard to keep your mind on the ball and focus every day, even though your not doing sales. Have been slackish for one or two days and now the traffic just dries up (what little there was), how depressing, I suppose there may be residual SE traffic over time, I suppose I"m just too impatient. I do enjoy making them, its a good challenge to not get that rejected email from mr mary lou:D Seems like it will take a long time to create an income flow, perhaps I should make a link list or two like others on here, at least then it will be more niche traffic coming in by some submitters. Oh well, another day tomorrow, I'll get up and try to get motivated to make my little free sites with the hope that they may bring in some sales, maybe picking more sponsors and trying them is the go as well, then you have to start all over again with new sales pitches, new banners, blah blah blah. Yes, better than working at Mcdonalds, but maybe thats where I will end up if I cant get back to making money in adult. Sorry about the long boring rant, I thought it would be good to air it in the noobs section, cos the bottom line is I'm just a noob, one that used to do well, but cant get back on the damn wagon!!! |
forget about it, there is too much free porn so people do not buy anymore adult membership paysites...
To make money now, you have to invest $400,000k to make an affiliate platform or at least 10k if you want to start a Free site and feed it with traffic to grow your trades. Others than these 2 options, you will spend time and money and will not get your roi. Sad but true, sorry :( |
I hear that Walmart is hiring
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Oh, and I agree. Building/submitting free sites does suck. |
Building them is quite nice, but I find that submitting gets to be a bit of a pain.
|loony| After building and submitting freesites for eight months I pretty much make a sale per day now, so people do sign up and money can be made. At various points along the way I try and tweak something, or buy a new domain for a new hub, or start a little webcam site, all gradually building up my little porn-galaxy. It seems to be working....slowly but surely. Almost every month has seen an increase in traffic & sales all round, but sometimes there are scary weeks where I have doubts. If that happens I just carry on building anyway and maybe concentrate on freshening up my outlook with a new little project. I'm sure that pretty good money can be made with freesites only, and my current numbers seem to suggest this is possible with enough hard work, but to get enough to live on you probably need to create your own little world of networked freesites/hubs/ etc to keep Mr Surfer in amongst your ads even if he thinks he's already left. :) Did that make sense? |
It made perfect sense Gary and I agree with pretty much everything You said
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why are we making freesites then??? I started working on this because of the so called snowball thing, thats why I still keep on working on the damned freesites. But all I see is people complaining they dont get money, now I'd really like to know if its actually true you can make decent cash out of this. And Im not just talking about the "big ones" but everyone who actually works to get this thing done. Otherway this wouldnt have any sence, please someone set this clear!
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You can certainly make a living from Free Sites.
They last a hell of a long time, if not forever, and will continue to get hits for years to come. But yes, they should be incorporated into a larger network of sites. The snowball effect does work but you can't just sit back and wait for it to happen. Keep working, keep building, and watch the magic begin! |waves| |
It ain't like it used to be, that's for sure.
It's gotten worse in '06, too. It'll be interesting to see what happens in '07. |
JD,
Why just focus on free sites? If you build and submit one free site a day, you should have plenty of time left to build some sites for search engines where you can be more aggressive with your sales approach. It does take some time to get listed in the search engines (sometimes 9 months to a year) and you will be spending some extra time doing link trades to hopefully increase your position in the serps, but this is traffic that keeps on selling for years. ;) Don't just focus on one thing. If for example you use an "exit" link on your free sites you can exit to a nice mainstream and search engine friendly site of your own that has adsense ads on it. All those clicks that pay anwhere from a few cents to ??$$ adds up real fast. :) |
Thanks guys for your comments, this forum is nice and positive, and I shall try to keep learning and reading :D
@ Cleo - We dont have walmart in Australia, it would be kmart or target or maybe best for less lol |thumb |
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I dont think theres ANY shame in working anywhere in the world at any place. You still have your dignity (there are limits of course, like Deuce bigallows dad who cleans shitters, but hey, people like doing that too, as he did) People with shitty jobs sometimes work harder than lazy asses like ourselves that sit at computers. My opinion anyhow, I tend to respect some kid working at Mcdonalds as much as some other dude working down a mine, they are all just trying to make a living |thumb
However, personally, its much harder (mentally) trying to make yourself do something that you "hope" will make you enough money to buy a loaf of bread, as opposed to going to a job where u know what to do and there is a pay check at the end of the day. |
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I've actually only been to a Walmart once in my life and it was like at one in the morning. I bought a rather tacky solar powered lighted bird feeder that I still keep full of feed although I don't think it still lights up at night but the birds don't seem to mind. We don't have Walmarts on the east side of town and after visiting one I can see why.
None of this has anything to do with this thread, I guess I'm an irrelevant type of girl. |potleaf| |
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Diversify. Work on short term stuff for part of your day, long term stuff for the rest. Prosper. Think like the smart farmer who plants more than one crop. Diversify. And don't let dipshits who thought it was all about free money and failed when work was involved get you down. |
I'm more worried about the falling value of the dollar at the moment.
But you have to look on the positive side... £1 uk pound = $1.94 USD so my hosting bill is going to be cheaper this month. :) |
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My hosting costs $75/month which is around £41 at the moment - great, but on the flip side a $1000 payment into a UK bank returns just over £500. My brain automatically and instantly halves my earnings every time I calculate something. :( I agree with Japamor & Sheepguy - it is possible to make money if you stay on top of your game. Working smart and organising your work day is incredibly important. Distraction when you're sat at your computer is so easy, and before long you've lost an hour reading a forum or a few articles. (GG&J gets me every time :D ) If you aim to build a freesite per day, then make that your priority every time as it's your "bread & butter" job. If you don't like building freesites then do it in stages. Freesite content, non-freesite-task, Freesite structure, non-freesite-task, Freesite gallery layout, non-freesite-task etc etc ...but always get that freesite built and submitted. Try and look forward to that sweet "just-done-my-submits" feeling! Plus, don't watch your sponsor stats too closely! Obviously you have to keep an eye on what's doing well for you, or not, but don't sit there staring at Unified Stats as the run comes to an end every half an hour and feel your heart sink when the sales don't come. It's depressing when you do that. How many non-sales stats runs do you see in a day? As I said earlier, I'm really pleased with my progress, but I've built a few domains and a few hubs in between my freesite building, my main hub being http://www.pynio.com/ which I treat like a real link list. I also have a couple of cam sites out there. I link to these sites from my freesites now and then, trying to trap the surfer into my own little network of porn. I find that these side projects are great for getting the creative juices flowing and I enjoy time spent developing them. The "trapping the surfer" advice was one of the first pieces of truly great advice I got from GG&J. A few folks here said that it was the best way to go and I think it works pretty well. (Thanks again for the great tips, folks) I haven't reached that magic stage yet where I have so many freesites out there that the sales are rockin', but I'm very optimistic that I can get there if I stick to the plan and work to my goals. :) |
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Good thing I have a dollar account at my bank so I can keep the money on there until the dollar restores itself. |
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I used to get $1.58 Canadian on the US dollar, now I get $1.09 :( |
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USD at it's lowest value against the pound in 14 years.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6158897.stm |
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JD |
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So what was that a couple weeks ago? And I havent got round to doing them, its 11.30am in the morning and although been at the pc for hours, I havent really achieved shit today, LOL, and now the crickets on, so bloody hell, I think I might plan next weeks stuff, and try to stick witht hat each day and re-assess next Friday, LOL. However, I'm trying to design my own custom site hub which hopefuly may have some lasting results when it eventually gets a bit of SE traffic etc. |
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One thing I do though is religiously make a list every day about things I should do the next day. Then half of it slides by undone as new shit to do today or tomorrow comes up. Every couple of weeks or so I look through the old lists, pick the stuff out I really should have done but didn't and toss the rest. And ya gotta take breaks, spend time with the wife, go to the pub, hang out with buddies. A hub is a good start biz wise though, anythings better than doing the same thing all day every day, and it's long term so you can do a bit every day. But cricket? Dude, don't they take breaks for tea?|yawn| ;) Now rugby, there's a sport!! |
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I'm starting "Link List 2" this week...who's with me? |bananna| |bananna| |bananna| |bananna| |bananna| |
Hey JD missed this thread, I havent been on the board other than just checking in for a few minutes a couple days ago for a while. Been busy and crazy here, the wife had every single one of her teeth pulled yesterday (has some kind of deteriorating jaw bone disease that is hereditary) she's been passed out on pain meds and I gotta wrangle the little heathens and try to get something done at the same time. When she is awake from the pain meds she's being a phsyco bitch from hell because she cant smoke at all, so quitting smoking on top of all that other shit.
Like I was saying before man, its all about just sticking with it, and even then you are gonna still have bad times, last month was my worst month of the year, the last week of the month was what I am hoping a complete fluke, there are a couple of reasons that I know for sure contributed to this, so at least I know what went wrong. The first thing is that a new site I started promoting changed all their content, at first they were doing better than any site I had ever promoted before, so I thought hell I am gonna go balls to the wall with this site the rest of this month, then they changed all their content and I went from getting 7 sales with the first 1800 hits sent (and they count more hits than most sponsors) to getting 2 sales the rest of the month! Then the other (my poor wife), my wife had a buch of doctors appointments and shit to go to, not only for her mouth, but this last July hurt herself at work and we just finalized getting that all taken care of and she just a week ago was realeased from her restrictions, I have been running her all over the whole fucking state of Indiana to see all these different doctors for her various ailments instead of making and submitting free sites, I probably missed at least 10 days of submitting in November. Yeah it does suck and I have been feeling burnt out for the last few months, but like you said it sure beats the hell out of working at McDonalds. My wife works hard at peice of shit factory where they actually sit there and time people with a fucking stopwatch and if you aint fast enough you get bitched out big time, and if your a new person and aint fast enough to get the boot your first day, my wife has been working there busting her ass for close to 3 years now I think and they said they couldnt afford to give raises this year, so she might be making like 80 cents more an hour than what she was when she first started. She gets up at 4:30 in the morning drives 20 miles there to start at 6 and goes full speed until 2:30 then drives 20 miles home. On my worst months we make about the same (like last month), but pretty much every month I make at least 25-30% more than she does. And I get up whenever the fuck I want to, go to bed whenever the fuck I want to. I wake up in the morning sit and watch the news, drink my coffee until my poor pathetic ass thinks I am ready to go and get some work done. And by work, I mean sitting on my ass looking at porn, make some web pages, then go to more porn sites, fill out some simple forms (for which I have software for) and click the submit button. I should have it so hard, haha. When I start feeling bad for myself and thinking oh damn how am I ever gonna go on, I am so burned out, if I have to make another gay sex movie site I am gonna puke, etc. I just think about my wife's day, and the shit she puts up with from her boss. I mean if I actually count the hours of actual work I do (not reading boards, reading articles, chatting, getting side tracked and finding myself reading about the Cubs, Colts, and Pacers, but actually dealing with content and buidling pages) I probably only work a couple hours a day on most days, now there are days where I have extra to do and there might be a couple 12 hour days a month, but the average day consists of very little actual work. After thinking about all that, haha, I always come to the conclusion that gee maybe I dont have it so hard after all. I know I went thru a stage exactly like what you are doing right now man. I got so used to making easy huge money hand over fist with little or no work at all, or work a bunch for a while and then not have to do anything for months. My work day back in the day used to consist of looking at my traffic trade script stats and chat with the other webmasters I traded with about how drunk and fucked up we got the night before, making the money in 2 days what I now make in a month. I used to go from different thing to different thing because surely there has got to be something no one is telling me about, there has gotta be that one hidden secret, and no one will let the cat out of the bag. I always gave up on shit before I even fully figured it out, because I had gotten so spoiled, got so used to making so much money with so little effort. I went on for a long time like that not making money at all. Then I got my wake up call, I had a few little side jobs here and there that sucked, had a paper route (what a fucking joke), but the one thing that got to me the most that I had to do or become homeless was WORK AT WALMART!! HAHAHA, I worked in the garden center. I loaded 40lb bags of dirt into people's mini vans, once loaded so many patio blocks into a station wagon that the exhaust was dragging on the ground. Basically man I figured this out, the big secret is that there is no secret, you just gotta keep on keeping on. If you aint happy with something fix it, always go thru and see if there are things you can do better. I know my mind runs continuously 24/7 about how I could tweak this or improve that. Your best two friends when making free sites are hard work and time. |
Wow. nice post Mr Exotic!
Sorry to hear about your wife, that sounds terrible, I had one root canal that collapsed and had to have it basically shattered and ripped out of my mouth (was a molar!) back in New Years Eve of 2000 and that sucked ass (especially as I was on heavy pain killers and stupidly drank that night as it was new years eve lol). I HATE to think of the pain involved with a full mouth of teath being removed, that would suck man!!! Is she going to have just false teeth to replace them as I suppose anything fancy would cost the earth, especially in the states. No wonder November sucked with all the shit you had to do, so at least you know the reason behind it, you needed to have your robot at home making all the sites for you while you werent there. I dont do gay sex sites anymore, just sticking to the straight ones, I used to do em for avs but I would rather do something I at least like doing, so no more gay sites for me! Are they converting good btw? (gay sites) I think these days its hard to bloody pick sponsors, I just find ones I never knew existed, and it takes years to find out which ones are good, thats why I have decided to go back to some of my old faves I started out with that are still going today. You guys always hanging it on that walmart store, the people that own that chain are like right behind bill gates as richest in the world, or somewhere up there any how, I reckon a similiar job here would be to work at bunnings, which is this shitty garden supply chain store, hehe. Take it easy man, sounds like u got it much harder than I have, regards JD |
Damn MrExotic, I'm considering getting all of my teeth pulled too (too much Pepsi over the years and 3 kids sucking the calcium out of my body), reading that just made me decide to put it off longer, lol. I sure hope your wife feels better soon... but not so soon that she doesn't get a good break from that hellhole she works at. Sheesh. Maybe you should teach her HTML and get her a domain so she can start doing this on the side? After a year she might be able to tell them to take this job and shove it... :)
JD, a Kmart or Target is pretty much the same thing as Walmart. It's really not so bad if you can get a shift working at night when there are less customers to bother you, lol. But still, there's a lot of ass-kissing and political bullshit going on that just makes it shitty overall. I worked at Walmart back in like '94 unloading the trucks at night. Talk about the fastest "get toned up and in shape" exercise program in the world, they should've charged people to do that instead of paying them! No matter what anyone says, or how they look down their nose at Walmart (or other "shitty" jobs), it's a steady paycheck and there's no shame in being responsible and paying your bills. Some folks sound like they'd rather go on welfare than "lower" themselves by getting a job at Walmart. So I say thumbs-up to all the folks that have done shitty jobs when they need to - you took care of what you were supposed to be taking care of, and that's all that mattered. I'm with SheepGuy... diversify. You never know, some strange law could come along or some company adult depends upon (like Visa) could make some policy change and freesites could be out the window next month. If that's the only thing you're doing, you're up shit's creek. Plus it keeps things more interesting when you diversify and gets less monotonous. Try blogging, building little SE portals, single-page SE wonders, anything. Just keep it interesting for yourself and don't put all of your eggs in one basket. |
First I have been to the board in like a week. Been working my balls off. After the bad month of November December started off just as shitty, so I decided I had to rededicate myself to my galleries again. When I started free sites I let my galleries just kinda go on their own, figured out that while the free site stuff was growing slowly the gallery money has started drying up faster than the free site money is growing, time to do both full time. Not to mention I am in the workings of starting up my own linklist, which I am hoping to have launched by the end of the year.
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This thread realy shocked me... Im new in this world of adult sites.
I did a little research about free sites and affiliates... well i think that they can be compatibile but... You have to be smart about it. You need to have a good vision what the site will look like and what its purpose is. You need to set long term goals and go go go! Dont stop! I'm quite sure that google, SEO, little brain storming can do everything... Regards... |
It sure takes time and it is harder than it use to be. Over the years I have gotten burnt out or lazy, more times that I can probably count, but my adult stuff has always made more than any regular job would pay. I believe any one can make more than say, walmart pays. Just one sale a day would pretty much cover that. But, the biggest drawback of this business, any business for that matter, is you dont have a boss hanging on you to make sure the work gets done. We all know, though we dont want to admit it, that it's real easy to get distracted, the net has a million distractions. It's too easy to find out 3 hours later you have'nt gotten any "work" done. You sure have to be disicplined.
When I started in this biz, my motivation was to get away from the job, I was SO sick and tired of working for some one else, working when they told me to, taking the crap pay they wanted to pay me. Same went for my wife having to take stupid crap at a stupid job. My wife was'nt thrilled with the idea, but I told her I was going to do it, it was going to work and that was that. It did'nt take long to make more than the job was paying, because I knew it was going to work. It is harder in this business than it use to be, so we need to work smarter, more efficient and most important, get the most out of what we do. It amazes me every day to see people not getting the best out of their work. We all have a limited amount of traffic, so it is in our best interest to squeeze every cick out of it. How many people even track their ads? Not many from what I see. If you want to get the most of your traffic, how can you do that when you dont know how your ads are performing, or how they are not performing? Every day I see sites that would not get listed anywhere, yet the same people keep doing it ever day. I still see people using ads I know do not pull crap for clicks, yet they keep doing it every day. It use to be you could throw up a crappy site and make money. I use to churn out crappy avs site after crappy avs site and every one I made would make at least one sale, every time. Being that it's not as easy as it use to be, I believe, more than before we need to treat this like a real business, not really a bad thing. If you had a real life brick and mortar store, would you keep trying to sell products that customers did'nt buy? Or sell products that did'nt make a profit? More importantly would you keep using ads that did'nt bring many customers in your store? If you did google adwords, would you keep using an ad that did'nt get clicks? Would you keep paying for clicks that did'nt make you any sales? Blogging is the big rage right now and it does work. Yet I see far more crap blogs than good ones. Some people believe if they mass produce enough, they will get enough traffic. On the other hand what if you did one really good blog instead of 10 crap ones? Could save you time and make you more money. I have one blog that out pulls all my other blogs and really dont take that much more time. How many people read marketing or sales books? We are in the business of marketing and or sell porn, well actually a fantasy, but it's still selling and marketing an idea/product. Can we say we do our best to sell it? Most people making good money do it by having multiple streams of income. If one slows down or dissappears, it wont be as much of a big hit. The same could be said for traffic, the more sources, the less one loss is going to hurt. So often I see people complaining they are not making any money, yet they have a high post count in a short time on a message board. Dont complain if your not doing the work. By the same token, networking is so important in this business, more that most realize, yet few do it. But moderation can be the key. If you dont like doing free sites, dont do them, or at least do other things like blogs or hubs, ect, or to build up other things so you might be able to get away from free sites. It's been said over and over, the more you enjoy something, the better chance you'll have at success. The opposite can be true. I think that most would agree, besides galleries, free sites are the best avenue at getting descent traffic if your new or not networked. I have done some free sites and I know the traffic can last quite a while, longer than I thought. If we know they produce traffic, are we doing all we can to get sales out of the traffic? Or we getting the most traffic out of each site? Many people dont get listed everywhere like they say. Lets face it, we all KNOW this business is making billions, we all know that for a fact. The money is there, we just have to do the best to grab our share. Every one has the opportunity. None of the above is directed at any one in this thread or on this board, just my rambling and observations. And I'll be the first one to admit, I have been guilty of it all at one time or another..;) |
Hi Ronnie
Nice post! Re:tracking banner conversions etc. what do you use for tracking banner conversions? I have to admit I have always been a "throw a new banner in there" type of webmaster and i have never kept track of good banners vs bad banners. I suppose theres some scripts out there that you could use, but I would not want to piss any link list owners off, if it has some fancy java or cgi on the page. What would you suggest for banner tracking? And what about text link tracking, is it possible to track this? The way I have always made sites is to just whack home made text links in, or some banners from the site in question, never paying too much attention to which free site the sales came from etc. Even today I find it a bit tricky to know exactly what site made the sale. Unless you make a new NATS campaign for each site you do, but nats isnt available for sponsors such as top bucks, tcg or nasty or bang bros etc. I have to say, I am just trying anything and everything right now, just to make a couple of sales, so I am all over the show really lol. I have some blogs but they are probably under your "crap" ones you mentioned. I dont always know what direction to go, so I do a bit of everything, but thats not necesarily a good thing as I could possibly be beter going in a direction that suited me more. Some people say, work out what works and multiply that, but I havent really found anything that works as such yet, as it does seem to be months and months of doing somethng before you will see a result, and being impatient at the best of times is not a good trait for me as I know you have to wait like 3-6 months to see some results for free sites or blogs. Back to the grind ) cheers JD |
Hey man, most every sponsor I use I can tell where my sales came from, topbucks, nasty, etc. Except on those no data refferers, haha.
Right now I am still sticking with the free sites thing as my main thing, but I have decided if I want to really go anywhere I am gonna have to work way more and at different things at the same time, and doing different things at the same time is terribly hard for me, I get into a mind set and I have problems doing anything else, gonna have to get off the one track mind mode. Just here lately I have put a little more effort into my tgp galleries, starting up a link list, and getting ready to start a fake tgp project with my cousin that will probably end up being a full time job in by itself. Seems to get things going you have to give up your whole life, but once the ball gets rolling you still need to stay on top of things, but you can relax just a tiny bit. |
Try different things and figure out what you like doing.
Don't chase the money too hard, because it doesn't matter how much money you make, if you gotta sink alot of hours into it and if you don't enjoy what you're doing, sooner or later you'll quit. If you love what you do - for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health - you'll keep going. |
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