garett

I realize that. I'm not talking about absolute effect .. I'm talking on average. Trading and productivity is all about averages. You need a certain average productivity, with first click going to galleries or not, to send more to trades than they send you. But with first click going to gallery you need your productivity to be much higher.

Let's use your example and see what we come up with.

If you get 2 surfers, 1st clicks 15 and 2nd clicks 1 then you've got an average productivity of 800%. 2 clicks went to a gallery for sure .. so that leaves 14 clicks, or 87.5% of your clicks, that could go either way. Of those 14 clicks you send 40% to trades .. that's 5.6 hits out of the remaining 14.

So .. you've sent 5.6 hits to trades out of 16 clicks. 5.6 is 35% of 16. You lost 5% of potential hits out to trades. As your numbers grow this loss will increase .. like the 12% in my example.

Ideally you want to send more to trades than they send you. If you're skimming 50% then you need an average productivity of 200% to send the same amount back to trades. If first click goes to gallery then you need 300%.

This is a simplistic way of looking at it, I'll admit. One trade might send you 150 clicks and your script is going to have to balance out those clicks over galleries and trades. But you can't grow your site unless you're sending more to trades, in general, than they're sending you. You need to be able to push your trades .. and by sending first click to gallery you're limiting that .. though the idea is that you'll get more clicks .. in my experience I haven't seen that. In fact, my traffic dropped a lot when I tried sending first click to gallery.

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