[Chop Smith]

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 gave up on Tgp's long ago. TPG traffic may be large, but conversions and retainment suck, and we're supposed to be in this together on partnership right?

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.

Why don't more sponsors make free sites?

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.

It would be a whole lot easier if the Sponsor makes however many free sites you want out there and put them in a zip file someplace. I'll download the zip, search and replace link codes, and put it up.

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.