Simon - BDSM - Fetish?

[Simon]

Originally Posted by MadCat

Now the big question, is it a good idea to have a BDSM catch-all and a Fetishes catch-all category on a linklist? I've had that setup going for a while on one of my former LL's and it seemed to work out okay, but it's very hard to accurately work it based purely on categories.

Sure, that's what lots of sites do. It's better than having just a BDSM, or worse, just a Fetish category for everything. But even having those two categories still mixes things which are best not mixed. Surfers looking for MaleDoms punishing submissive females are not interested in seeing men punished by FemDommes, and vice versa. So trying to monetize your category pages is going to be nowhere near the sniper shots it could be with a little finer filtering.

Originally Posted by Cleo

I've been going more by what I find listed under a category. So if I have a bunch of listings for Foot Fetish then I make a Foot Fetish category but if I only have one listing for Dancing Dwarfs then it would get mixed in with a general fetish category.

Exactly right, you can't really build a good category page without some listings to put there. If you have enough of any kind of fetish to break it out to its own page it's worth doing, given that there are sponsor paysites you can promote better from that new page. In fact, using your example, as long as someone knows of sponsors who have paysites with Dancing Dwarfs it's worth thinking about what else you might be able to put on that category page just to flesh it out enough to be useful for promoting the dwarfs paysite.

It's really about what can be sold from each page, and how filtering out those who aren't interested in certain things will result in more pre-qualified traffic on the new pages. That's the real reason to do this, so unless it'll generate more sales to create the additional pages there's no need to do the work. Making new category pages is part of the equation, with the other part being which niche and micro-niche paysites you can promote on those pages.