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I agree with Robbie, a personality site with good regular exclusive updates, coupled with email contact, live shows to members and other members only perks paying members receive from a site is key. Free is free and everyone likes free, but once that same content is free on all the sites and surfers are tired of seeing the same content everywhere they go they will look for exclusivity.
Content costs money to shoot and provided you have a rich daddy or some trust fund that will never run out you have to get paid somehow...there are only so many advertisers out there and they do not have an unlimited advertising budget, with every new free site out there it will also cut the cost a site can charge for advertising. The fact on advertising charges has already been proven, sites are not receiving the same dollar amount for an advert as they did two or three years ago. For us to advertise on a site now it is a fraction of what it costed a year ago.
Bandwidth cost has come down dramatically over the last couple of years, there has to be a bottom to cost cutting soon, how much cheaper can it go, the companies offering hosting also have to survive, they have overheads and staff, and we all love that 24 hr support - at the moment bandwidth is dirt cheap, any cheaper and it will not be worth while for the hosting companies to stay open....
There are so many conflicting stories on how much tube sites make, some say they make millions, others say nothing - Now unless someone actually supplies us with ground proof we can only speculate...but the profit on tube sites is directly linked to their advertisers and the bandwidth they pay...any cheaper bandwidth and they are the one's that will be laughing all the way to the bank, not the Free sites that are springing up a couple of years late in their eyes....picking up the scraps of ultra cheap advertising revenue....
If a free site pandemic started today, it will only be a matter of days before all that content was up on all the big tubes and once again webmasters will be crying at how the tubes fucked us.
The tubes already have the traffic, what is going to change, they not only will have your content on their site, but everyone else's too and in the mind of the surfer they would much prefer to go to a site that has it all under one roof than to have to go 10 or 15 different sites to check it out...
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