LL Owners. What do you look for in free hosted free sites?

[Viper]

Originally Posted by Useless Warrior

Howdy

Yes, most of us are getting a giggle at your expense, but we were giggling when we saw "free hosted free sites" in the thread title - so really, GG was just letting you know what everyone was thinking. (The blame falls directly on whomever the cocksucker was that came up with "free hosted gallery" - as if sponsors are loading their galleries onto KingHost.) We're beginning to see more sponsors altering the age-old jargon as they are referring to them (more appropriately) hosted galleries and, of course, hosted free sites.

*chuckle*.. really.. does it matter? "free hosted" means you're not paying for the hosting of the gallery/site. Technically, EVERY gallery or free site is a "hosted" one. And in terms of the LL owner, they're all "free hosted" in a way. Sticking the term "free" in front of it is just a way to indicate it's sponsor provided as opposed to submitted or built yourself. If we really wanted to come up with names that truly defined what these things are, we should clear the slate. I have a feeling this is one of those "pet peave" type things on this board so won't say anything else about it.

If you want to get into a discussion of a truly "strange" term, just think about "free site". Seriously. I know that many eons ago people actually built true "sites" that got listed on the link lists. But now it's just 4 pages, mirrored a bunch of times so it's not even unique and hosted on some domain which probably has dozens of them along with maybe a LL, TGP or some other form of "free site". I mean even a LL that has content on it is a type of "free" site.

But again, it doesn't really matter as long as we all talk about the same thing. I had someone yesterday telling me about how good buying banner spots is. Given my own experiences I just couldn't figure out what they were talking about. It turns out they were talking about buying gallery spots (on a thumb preview type site). But for some reason there's some misinformation that seems to be forming out there. Too much useless confusion when everyone uses different terms.

Originally Posted by Useless Warrior

A couple of points you aren't likely to find in those threads is that, though you'll see less traffic to HFSs than to your HGs, the traffic which flows to them is REAL/unskimmed/non-redirected surfers. Link Lists don't script their traffic trades and do not skim. Secondly, even though a typical free site contains about twice the content as a hosted gallery, the majority of the sales will come from the first two pages; the warning and main pages. Free sites have a somewhat magical ability to push traffic to the tour BEFORE the surfer bothers to view the content. Neat, huh?

Thanks for that... I read the other posts but first pass thru, didn't really see any info there that was "different" from just building standard free sites. Will read thru it again later. Given these sites are built specificaly for LL owners I'm surprised there aren't some additional "we'd like" things but maybe I missed them the first time.

Free sites "confuse" me. I've done a few in the last few months and had problems getting listed. I tend to build all my stuff "heavy" on the selling. Plenty of text, maybe additional teaser type pics etc. Since day one I've always tweaked my stuff and I know I make more per page view than most people in the TGP area. So I thought that would be a great fit with free sites. But now, after having had low acceptance rates and looking at all the piss poor sites that get accepted, it seems that if you want to get listed, you throw up a couple banners on some pages with some content and you're good to go. I'm working on some new "simpler" designs and will see how those ones go. But I really don't understand that and maybe you can clarify for me.