ADL Colin

Here's one of the first articles ever written about TGP2.

TGP2

A Revolution in the Making? (Aug 13, 2001) by Colin Delia

There's a small movement gathering some momentum that most of you have suddenly heard about in the past week. There's a buzz. There's an excitement. There's something on every webmaster board about it. TGP2. Have you ever watched a movement start from the ground up, noticing every little nuance. It looks just like this. Chilling?

For the past 6 (almost 7) years, I've seen many free site models come and go. There has been a rather consistent pattern with those new models. There is usually a brief period of opportunity, followed by a real boom, and then eventually a bust.

Back in 1997, Top 50's and circle-jerk sites fed off each other, and contrary to almost everyone's expectations, a few of the top 50's were able to surpass Persian Kitty, at that time, entrenched at number one on every adult public counter service there was. Lots of people couldn't believe it when it happened, but there was a group of us circle-jerk site operators that had a very strong network .. and many of us saw it coming months before it did.

Now some people were saying "don't do top 50's and cj sites because they will never last." Now, in a sense they were right, they won't/didn't last forever. The bust DID come. I don't think there are any top 50's in the top 100 on Sex Tracker anymore. And there are very few circle-jerks. Many of those circle-jerk sites evolved into what is called CJ2 (less popups, some stringent rules, etc) .. and both before and after that some evolved into TGPs.

There's a post at the Adult Webmaster Info board by Shap, one of the most successful TGP owners out there. He runs picwarehouse.com, sexape.com and some others. This post was from back in June of 1999 and it details the exodus from cj's to tgp's. If you read carefully what he says, there is some excellent advice there that is still valid today. You'll also notice from reading his post that even though those big CJs were disappearing they were VERY USEFUL and became a different sort of money maker than they were originally, becoming the basis of some of the largest TGPs on the net.

Now, back to what I was saying, when Top 50's came out, the people that first started them gathered all the traffic because everyone that wanted to try it had to trade with them (there was no on else to trade with). So sites like Cliffy's Top 50 and Adult Origin blew up fast. A bunch of imitators got a lot of traffic fast. Those of us running circle-jerk sites were starting with almost no traffic and would have sites with over 100,000 uniques per day in just two weeks. For a while, it was crazy, but eventually there was a bust (or was it a fadeout?). Too many people in it, competing free site models, or whatever. There were a lot of factors and none of these things is ever easy forever.

Now, if you look at the top 100 list on Sex Tracker right now, you'll notice almost every single site is a TGP. That's where all the traffic is. Now those of you that run them or are gallery makers have also noticed that the traffic converts ridiulously low. If you're not using a free host, you have to be skilled to survive! On Z Thumbs I have 1000 really nice galleries with 20 thumbs each. 20,000 really nice free porn pics on one site. As you can imagine, sign-up ratios are pretty low. Now the TGP2 model is simple. Gallery makers can only give away 5 free pics. There are variations on this. Some say no hardcore. And there are some other rules people have come up with that are pretty good. We're hoping that giving these surfers less free porn leads to higher signup ratios. There have been some early reports that there are. These reports seem based on pretty limited data. So we'll have to see.

I'm converting one of TGPs More Porn Pics to a TGP2. Click here for details and I'll report back here in about a week and let everyone know how it's going. Will outclick ratios drop? Will people stop bookmarking? Or will the faster loading pages actually be a benefit to the site traffic?

I think the TGP 2 model is a little difficult to read. It doesn't contain a NEW WAY to trade traffic. Circle Jerks started out by allowing people to have blind links, then consoles, then right clicks. All new ways of getting traffic. Top 50s motivated other webmasters to send you as much traffic as possible. Robin' ABC console (anyone remember that?) was a top 50 without anyone leaving your site for good. TGPs gather lots of bookmarkers and then trade them out to other sites with lots of bookmarkers. Now CJ2 was a little like TGP2 is. It doesn't contain a new method of generating/obtaining it has gained some measure of success. Very recently, the TGP and CJ2 have almost blended together as many that operate CJ2s started using 50-60% content.

One way that these new free site models work is by a group of people breaking off and forming a close trading group. All of the above free site models owe part of their success to these small groups breaking off and racking up some traffic before others jumped on. Then some groups trade primarily amongst themselves as the late-comers jump on and wonder why it's so difficult all of a sudden.

TGP2 might end up the same way, thought it may be somewhat complicated. Small groups can form all they want, but large TGPs can instantly change their sites to TGP2 sites. Of course, if everyone changed, it would be pretty nice anyway. At any rate, A group of TGP2 webmasters is quickly forming and there is a certain comraderie it seems to me. A certain vigilante, throw up links to other TGP2 webmaster pages, start trading all over the place, only the devil may care attitude. A sense, a feeling, that maybe we are on the verge of something great. I hope we are!

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