You could always join us at OTB on Saturday.. MML dispenses extremely valuable information.. |pink not to mention all the witty commentary!!

Dare,

I have restrained myself from replying to this tread, because I realize that my reply could be viewed as spammy. Since I think I have a couple of points that have not been addressed, I am going to take a chance of being spanked.

I have got numbers showing the downhill spiral of the quality of TGP traffic started at least three years back. The only correlation that I can draw is that it started downhill when TGPs' were forced into listing only preferred submitters. This is just an observation and might not have a damn thing to do with it.

Part of it is the time involved in building a free site or the cost since our time is really our money. Several things go into this:
Design
I could probably deliver you 50 new galleries by morning and guarantee that they would all look somewhat different. When you dealing with 1 page, you can template the hell out of it, regardless if it is .php or .html. Also, I think that TGP owners are more tolerant of templates. On the opposite, LL owners are less tolerant of templates. And it is a fact that there is not that many ways to do a warning page and main page. It is made easier if the sponsor resorts to a graphical design, but then most of the better LL frowns on this type of design. It is a hard call for the sponsor so I think most of your larger sponsors just say to hell with it and end up missing the second best traffic to there tour, assuming that SE would be the best.
Coding
After you have the promo designed (html) then you have got to deal with passing the affiliate code (php). Dealing with a one-page gallery, it is a simple matter. Dealing with four pages, it is more difficult. I don't think it is intentional, but if you follow the code thru on some free hosted sites you will find that the reference to your affiliate code is lost. To prove this you might have to hit your back button several times and do some stupid moves that surfers do. Honestly, regardless of what anyone says capturing the QUERY_STRING on the entry page is not enough. It has got to be done on all four pages and for every link, if you are using php, you have got to have at least three lines of code. God knows, I wish someone could prove me wrong on this but if you are going to be safe with your php code, there is no easy way. Finally, on this point some of us small operators value link list traffic, the last thing we would want is to piss an owner off or to be perceived as cheating the LL owner out of his traffic.

The shit sticks theory.
I'm borrowing this theory from a person that I value his opinion much and regardless of the degree of success I have in this business I will always be appreciative of his support and help. His theory goes something like "if you throw enough shit on the wall some is bound to stick." IMO most of the "successful sponsors" subscribe to this theory. Therefore, since they are well established they will keep throwing it by using the easiest method that happens to be hosted free galleries.

I am not sure that you are quite correct here or perhaps I misunderstood you. If you are correct, I damn sure want to do it. But if you are referring to your link list, why would you want to waste your time and pay for the bw. Whereas if you use the FHS, the sponsor is pays for the bandwidth. I think it would be doing a submitter an injustice if a sponsored zipped a FHS, the submitter just changes the link code and submits it just to have it rejected because the LL is already listing the original FHS.

I have missed something here, haven't I?


Straying off the subject of your thread somewhat, I want to share an excerpt from my business plan that was written close to two years ago, but I think it holds true today. In the future; like TGPs, I believe that there will be very few link list accepting submissions. I think that most will be using hosted free-sites. At the present time there are very few sponsors offering hosted free-sites while most are providing hosted galleries. Hence, I believe that even the big link list owners would prefer listing quality hosted free sites from someone that they trust and earn revenue from the listing as opposed to listing sites from a submitter. Therefore, the plan will be to build one hosted free site and one hosted gallery each day for each site Now I realize that there could be several reasons for me missing the boat here - shitty designs, inability to properly convert, the use of ccBill, etc., but I think it would benefit some of us "small timers" to have your constructive comments.

Nice post Chop

DD

I will skip the next 80-90 replies and just add quickly that you should be thankful for the *free site* as a promotion fact. I think that, if free sites get as popular as TGPs the bulk traffic will increase, but the level of quality traffic will drop down quickly as well. At least I think so, while free site building is a good way to do quality advertisming, I don't think that having more of these ready-2-submit free sites is a really good idea.

I just want to add something to this fine pice of writing. Here's a little example of a possible linkcode for hosted free site, in order to track the aff ID:

sponsorsite.com/free_sites/affiliate_id/site01/
sponsorsite.com/free_sites/affiliate_id/site01/main.html
sponsorsite.com/free_sites/affiliate_id/site01/gallery1.html

You can use mod_rewrite and you keep the affiliate ID in the URL, your whole problem is solved and that is not even coding.

Also, miding the fact that there're such things as cookies and sessions (sessions require cookies, but they can be loaded thru a GET/POST variable that could be also taken from the URL via mod_rewrite), passing thru a single page will solve your tracking problem.

As a conclusion I will say that most probably, free sites are rarely provided by sponsors, because of the tons of restrictions of different LLs (at least that's the way I see it). Also lets not forget the fact that FHG are built times quicker than HFS (hosted free sites), which leads to the simple calculation - less time, more FHG, more traffic. I think that's the way a sponsor owner will look at it, also isn't it true that most of the webmasters are doing galleries, but not free sites? Again, more FHG submitters than HFS submitters...

It seems that time is the main reason there're less HFS provided by sponsors. FHG are added sometimes 10 per week, in a month that is 40 in a year total of 520 FHG, 2'000'000 uniques each for the gallery's life time with conversion ratio (FHG => paysite) about 1:1000, that will lead to 2k uniques per gallery. On 520 galleries that is 1'040'000 and that number kills.

Maybe these numbers are big for many of the sponsors out there, but they may also be pretty small for the ones that can afford to build so many FHG. And that is quick traffic - it comes almost after publishing the new gallery, no submissions, nothing - just build it, publish it and they will come.

Huh, my reply is too long isn't it :)

I don't think there are a lof of people on this board that want them either :D

Hosted Free Sites are for Links Lists just as Hosted Galleries are for TGP owners. I'm sure that people also use both on hub pages & whatnot.

Free Sites and Galleries that sponsors put online for the webmaster to download & then upload to their own server is just a bad idea, because then they will start to submit those Free Sites & Galleries to Link Lists & TGP's & the reviewers for each will get very sick of seeing the sites & galleries over & over & over & next thing you know, the sponsor and/or submitter is banned.

I'd like to get some feedback on a couple Movie FHS before I start on more. I think they look pretty good but I've never built a free site in my life before these.

http://sites.bikinivoyeur.com/wild_g...k/?affilid=518

http://sites.nudebeachmovies.com/top...s/?affilid=518

Good & Bad, let me know! |peace|

BV

BV - those look fine to me, with the exception that it's Hosted Free Sites or HFS & not Free Hosted Sites :D

Cool, but who invented that acronym?

I think we are both wrong. lol

Providing galleries are galleries and free sites are free sites then FHG is to FHFS as Free Hosted Gallery is to Free Hosted Free Site. Not FHS or HFS, but I really don't care what we call them as long as they get used. |headbang|

No no no, it's HFS and HFG - FHG and FHS are very different things. I think. I've now completely lost track of all acronyms. |yawn|

Its FHG and HFS!

Ahh man it seems im gonna have to start a afiliate program that build good old fashioned free sites with loads of promo text and banners in different colors and :D

When you put the word "free" in front of the word "host" or some variation of it, you get bells & whistles going off & people tend to think it's "free hosting" which it's not.

It's a Free Site that the sponsor is hosting, thus it's a Hosted Free Site.

ours will be ready soon...id love to get feedback from people on this board before we release them to everyone

Phoenix - post them here & we'll give you some honest feedback :)

Sorry haven't been here in a bit-
Chop - that is exactly what I'm looking for.
IE... I have 10 lesbian links ready to list, I'd like 15.
What to do??
Hmm.. Chop's has 10 ready to download, change codes, upload.
BW is cheap, and the time spent may be 30 minutes.
I don't care about that.

Just build a free site that will conform to all the regular LL rules, and let us pick and take as we need.

I’m not sure what you want in free sites and what you promote...but we, as a sponsor, did build a massive all gay award-winning free site that has tons of converting gay traffic.

Before I became the marketing manager of the company I was very surprised and in love with the traffic and the conversions from it. (I’m still getting checks from sites I made 6 months ago.)

As of Jan 1st, there where 60,000 registered users, 45,000 that re-log in and actively use our free site.

You’re welcome to check it out. Our webmaster's area: http://www.justusboys.com/cgi-bin/user.cgi
Surfer area: http://www.justusboys.com/

andymike - it's been explained a couple times already in this thread - LOL - but it is a long thread, so I'll sum it up :)

A Free Site, in it's most basic form, is a warning page that leads to a main page that leads to 2 gallery pages with 10 pics on them.

So, if you have Hosted Galleries, you're pretty much 1/2 way there :)

LOL, well how about this, why dont sponsors make all the sites and then close down there programs to webmasters? If they are making sites then why do they need a webmaster?

Seems to me webmasters are to lazy and dont want to do any work or spend any money trying to build there businesses these days.

gimme gimme gimme

Webmaster means u work for yourself and that means you should allocate time in your day to build sites and build your business up and stop relying on everyone else to do all your work

Meat - I see NetpondCash has a lot of hosted galleries & feee sites - will you be removing them now? |couch|

:D

LOL no we wont Greeny:) That was me with my sponsor hat

We will try and add lots of content for webmasters and help them as much as possible:) Putting my webmaster hat on now:)

Not sure if im allowed to do this but here is a clip from one of our sites we will launch soon.

http://fetters.premiumratedcontent.com/alicia.wmv

Its very extreme and i will make sure we have plenty of free sites for webmasters to use.

I just don't get it. What do sponsors say build your own free sites yet they ALL offer TGP galleries? It the same frigin thing. You could tell webmasters to build your own damn galleries. Same thing!!!

This is an example and not spam. I am using my little program in the example, but most sponsors offering HFS have or soon will have a similar download tool .

So you need five lesbian sites for Mark's-Links, you could go to http://chopscash.com/affiliates/hosted/ , set up your query in the form and receive a downloadable pipe delimited file to import into your LL script. Your affiliate code is already built into the downloaded links. So your thirty mintues is now down to 15?

check out www.AdultLounge.com

we have many Free Trial Sites if thats what you mean...

Ray Charles could tell this thread is not about Free Trial Sites.

lol, agreed :)