Business: To skim or not to skim?

I have always been of the opinion that products and services, that cater to the customer's needs and are marketed accordingly, are the best way to accomplish a sale. Not only that, but they're also the best way to have a satisfied customer base. Of course, you can't really please everybody, but then again the wise ones don't try that either.

Now, considering the above we could assume that the products we market, as adult webmasters selling to the surfers, are of prime quality. This is, of course, subject to argument depending on the sponsor, paysite, content therin, membership prices and so on, but let's just assume, for the sake of argument, that the paysites we try to sell memberships to are top-notch and therefore cater to the surfers' needs. This would mean that the product fulfills the criteria connected with satisfying the need which drives the demand.

This puts us in the position of trying to influence the surfers which way to go, once they've landed on our TGP's/MGP's. They want (need) porn and therefore they're browsing our sites. We want them to buy from our sponsors and therefore show them samples (galleries) or plain ads (banners, textlinks, HPA's etc.) of the paysites we want them to join. We also want them to stick around, bookmark, return and buy from (via) us more often, this keeps making us money. Furthermore, we also want to have link exchanges with similar sites, in the hope of getting fresh traffic that way.

While I don't see anything wrong with either of the above, the practical part that I feel doesn't really fit into this equation is the skimming part. Why? Simple, it's deceptive. You promise the customer something, he/she clicks willing to check it out, and gets something else. Imagine walking into a grocery store, looking for various groceries, only to find out that you're actually in a hardware store and you can't really eat the nails they're selling in there... I know, this may be an extreme comparison, but at the end of the day it's very similar to sending the surfer to a trade, instead of the gallery he/she expects to see. What this does is decrease the overall trust factor with the consumer.

This sets a precedent of being fooled into clicking on a link promising something and offering something totally different. I mean, if you click on a link saying "Hot busty babe spreading her pussy" and end up on a page full of text links, or lots of thumbs, none displaying anything similar to the description you just got, what would guarantee you that when you're on a gallery and click the "See more" link, you won't get the same thing? Or even on the paysite tour, when you click the "free preview" link? After all, once a thief, always a thief, and the surfers have no idea which of the links we, as free site owners, are really affiliated with and in control of.

At the end of the day, all skimming does, except for artificially inflate visitor numbers, but not necessarily sales numbers, is lower the trust factor of our potential client base. This regardless of them being inherent freeloaders or not, as I know some would argue they are.

My point, as you've surely noticed, is that skimming is bad. At least to me, following the above logic, it's bad. There are lots of different ways you can successfully exchange traffic with other sites, without deceiving the surfer one bit. Those would also bring in other synergy effects, like in the case of hardlink trading, such as more search engine traffic. Are we so set on cutting corners and rushing to have lots of traffic, that we completely forget the fundemental purpose of every single website we create? Which, in case you've forgotten, is to make money.