Has anyone noticed a massive drop in conversions?

[Simon]

For us it's hard to figure out right now, since we added our hfs's right in the midst of the 2257 craze and summer beginning. I can say that up until last month conversions were at 1:494 or better for our affiliates. And we get better than that on pure SE traffic. But now it's June, and now we have the link list traffic coming in from our hosted free sites, plus traffic direct to the sites' galleries from webmasters linking directly to those. So now we still have the usual affiliates in the 1:400 and better conversion ratios, but most of the new orders we're seeing from link lists are more like 1:700 to 1:1500.

So my question is, what kind of conversions are "normal" for traffic coming from people who've viewed a free site first, or who've viewed a gallery from a site? Is the kind of spread we're seeing what we should expect?

Simon